Looking for Formac ProMedia 40 ROM Rip

[stynx]

Perfect - a second card arrived here yesterday and had exactly this issue. Your timing is impeccable

Another difference is how the card selects a default setting. I find 1.0.6 selects a higher refresh rate by default which exceeds the capabilities of my elderly 4:3 LCD. This actually means I can't easily use 1.0.6 as most of not all of the boot key combinations also assume that my monitor is capable of high refresh rates. I sure there is a way around, but for now I just used the newer ROM.

Quite fascinating. I have the exact opposite situation. The 126 Rom seems to default to 75Hz while the 106 Rom defaults to 60Hz, in my case. I use an Extron RGB2HDMI 300A which can do almost everything you throw at it (15Khz - 120Khz no problem) and a Hauppauge standalone HDMI-recorder. The Extron RGB2HDMI 300A converts even the strange 31Hz resolutions of the 126 Rom but sadly shifts them so much to the right that i cannot get everything on screen.

 

[Phipli]

Quite fascinating. I have the exact opposite situation. The 126 Rom seems to default to 75Hz while the 106 Rom defaults to 60Hz, in my case. I use an Extron RGB2HDMI 300A which can do almost everything you throw at it (15Khz - 120Khz no problem) and a Hauppauge standalone HDMI-recorder. The Extron RGB2HDMI 300A converts even the strange 31Hz resolutions of the 126 Rom but sadly shifts them so much to the right that i cannot get everything on screen.

That's really odd!

Yeah, I've barely used the 1.0.6 ROM because I just end up in unsupported modes I'm using a 1280x1024 LG panel from the early 2000s. I need to replace the caps on the power board in my ViewSonic that can handle just about any video signal including from a Toby, which is useful (most LCDs don't like the output from a Toby).

 

[Phipli]

There is a jumper that has to be closed for the mac to work. If the jumper is not closed, the mouse pointer will not move and be invisible

On my card, the jumper in the same location is actually pre-populated with a header and called J4. It connects to pin 151 on the ViRGE chip, which is "Enable Feature".






So something to do with board expansion features. Formac must expect it to be enabled.

 

[stynx]

On my card, the jumper in the same location is actually pre-populated with a header and called J4. It connects to pin 151 on the ViRGE chip, which is "Enable Feature".
...
So something to do with board expansion features. Formac must expect it to be enabled.

I don't know where it goes on my card on the Virge chip but on the PCI-bus it goes to INTA and is used for the mouse in some kind of fashion. Without the Jumper, it just goes to an unpopulated feature connector.
It was actually the first time that a PC-Virge would not directly work on the mac. I have checked some PC-Virge boards bust most of them are just too slow in regards to the VRAM.
I have a 4x Virge PCI-graphics card (somewhere) with a cable-whip to connect 4 monitors. It uses a PCI bridge and 4 normal Virge-chips with memory and VGA-bios each on a 12" double-stack PCB PCI card. Due to some difficulties locating said board in the chaos i call storage, i could not test it out with the Mac. It would have been a very interesting Mac accessory since the 2D performance of the Virge is not bad at all. Having 4 high-res monitors in 1997 from a single PCI-slot would have been awesome.

 

[Phipli]

It would have been a very interesting Mac accessory since the 2D performance of the Virge is not bad at all. Having 4 high-res monitors in 1997 from a single PCI-slot would have been awesome.

F/A-18 Hornet supports multi-monitor views. I've never actually tried it, but if you set up 3 monitors you can have front and sides on three displays.

Might be a fun experiment. It would have to be software flat shading though as the various versions, only the Korea based on version 3.x supported hardware acceleration and that was just Glide and OpenGL.

 

[obsolete]

You guys seem to be having a lot of fun

I was hoping I could join in, but I'm not sure:



I've been using this card in an old PC just for booting into DOS to test and flash PC video cards. I grabbed it from a scrap bin many years ago and kept it around because it worked, and I thought it was a boring card with no Mac equivalent, so I wouldn't be tempted to flash it...

The little bit of research I've done makes it sound like the Virge/VX (988) is the same as the Virge you guys are using (325) but uses VRAM (early term for dual ported memory?) vs. standard DRAM. I have no idea whether that would make it different enough for the same firmware not to work.

 

[Phipli]

You guys seem to be having a lot of fun

I was hoping I could join in, but I'm not sure:
View attachment 98591
View attachment 98590

I've been using this card in an old PC just for booting into DOS to test and flash PC video cards. I grabbed it from a scrap bin many years ago and kept it around because it worked, and I thought it was a boring card with no Mac equivalent, so I wouldn't be tempted to flash it...

The little bit of research I've done makes it sound like the Virge/VX (988) is the same as the Virge you guys are using (325) but uses VRAM (early term for dual ported memory?) vs. standard DRAM. I have no idea whether that would make it different enough for the same firmware not to work.

So I tried a DX out of curiosity with no luck. It probably has a different VID and so the ROM doesn't like it. The various chips do have differences, but are pretty similar... A competent hacker could probably bodge at least 2D to work...

On the other hand, Number 9 is an interesting firm. Go back to the 80s, their first hardware was for the Apple II. They moved into fairly high end graphics cards. That S3 is one of the less fancy cards, but they actually made their own silicon, which Formac used.

This is my Formac Proformance 80, which uses a Number 9 Imagine 128 II (they tend to have Beatles song related names and strings in the ROM).



So the card is a good brand and probably one of the nicest S3s, but the Mac ROM we're flashing is for the vanilla Virge.

 

[stynx]

Here is a Virge DX (86C375) compatible ROM. It is recognized by the GA-control panel as a Virge and gets acceleration.

 

[Phipli]

Here is a Virge DX (86C375) compatible ROM. It is recognized by the GA-control panel as a Virge and gets acceleration.

Hang about!? Where is that from?

 

[stynx]

Hang about!? Where is that from?

I simply modified the Rom to see the DX in two locations.
0x0024: 3355 3156 -> 3355 018A
0x6867: 5333 38A0 5631 -> 5533 38A0 8A01
Textures are not rendered, though. The 3D-engine code in the GA-control panel has to be updated, it seems.

 

[Phipli]

I simply modified the Rom to see the DX in two locations.
0x0024: 3355 3156 -> 3355 018A
0x6867: 5333 38A0 5631 -> 5533 38A0 8A01
Textures are not rendered, though. The 3D-engine code in the GA-control panel has to be updated, it seems.

Perfect - I was wondering if it would happily do 2D with just an ID swap. I'm just much less proactive that you are!

 

[stynx]

Perfect - I was wondering if it would happily do 2D with just an ID swap. I'm just much less proactive that you are!

A Virge GX (SGRAM) works with the same Rom but is not usable since i get A LOT of errors while blitting and screen drawing.
After a few seconds, the screen is nearly unreadable. GA identifies the GX as a Virge, though.
The mouse is also not working at the moment.