ATI Radeon 9250 PCI cards, converting from 64-bit to 128-bit and other details

[obsolete]

@herd that's really cool, thanks! I've gotten a lot of good video card info from VOGONS. It's a great resource.

An eBay seller offered me a good price on a PCI Radeon 9200 SE. I haven't gone for it (yet). Based on the little research I've done, I expect the 9200 SE will have a device ID of 0x5964, which I don't think is supported by Mac OS at all. The 9200 and 9250 are 0x5961 and 0x5960 respectively. The different device ID is why the 9250 required a modified extension for OS 9 acceleration.

Does anyone know whether the device ID on these cards is set by the ROM? I've seen that on other ATI cards, for example a Radeon 9800 Non-Pro. Its device ID is 0x4E49, but if you flash it with a 9800 Pro ROM, it becomes 0x4E48 and is identical to a 9800 Pro in every way.

Maybe I should do a little experimenting with the device ID on the 9250 before jumping on the 9200 SE.

 

[obsolete]

I had some time last night so I tried changing the device ID in the ROM to 0x5964 on a card that would otherwise be 0x5960. This was the result (viewed with an NVIDIA AGP card):


As one might expect, it didn't work. My conclusion is either that 0x5960 is set in the hardware in a way I don't understand, or I just don't know what I'm doing.

I also checked the Radeon 8500 kext in Leopard and it supports 0x5960, 0x5961, 0x5962, and 0x5963, but not 0x5964. So a Radeon 9200 SE is a card that would need a modified ROM and modified drivers in both OS 9 and OS X. Since regular 9200s and 9250s already exist in the roughly the same price range with the same or better performance, my conclusion is that a 9200 SE is not worth my time. A determined person could make one work, though.

 

[zefrenchtoon]

I had some time last night so I tried changing the device ID in the ROM to 0x5964 on a card that would otherwise be 0x5960. This was the result (viewed with an NVIDIA AGP card):
View attachment 95254

As one might expect, it didn't work. My conclusion is either that 0x5960 is set in the hardware in a way I don't understand, or I just don't know what I'm doing.

I also checked the Radeon 8500 kext in Leopard and it supports 0x5960, 0x5961, 0x5962, and 0x5963, but not 0x5964. So a Radeon 9200 SE is a card that would need a modified ROM and modified drivers in both OS 9 and OS X. Since regular 9200s and 9250s already exist in the roughly the same price range with the same or better performance, my conclusion is that a 9200 SE is not worth my time. A determined person could make one work, though.

Maybe you will find (sort of) an answer here:

connect3D radeon 9200 flashing

connect3D radeon 9200 flashing

macos9lives.com

 

[obsolete]

Interesting, thanks for digging that up. I will play around a little bit more between 5960 and 5961.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

VidCard arrived today and it drives the 1920x1200 panel just fine over DVI, thanks, obsolete! Swapped the cables just to see and the first one you sent me does as well when hooked up to the HPZR24w. New one's back to only 1920x1080 when hooked up to the Dell 1440p, so it's time to dig out the long VGA cable to see if it will do better than the 2048x1152 limit of the 32MB card. With double the VRAM it might even do 1440p?

Macintosh Portrait Display is the only one I've used in that orientation. Have vague recollection of software that'll do the trick, but that was back in the 7.5 day. How the heck do you get a display into portrait mode under 9.2.2?

 

[obsolete]

Macintosh Portrait Display is the only one I've used in that orientation. Have vague recollection of software that'll do the trick, but that was back in the 7.5 day. How the heck do you get a display into portrait mode under 9.2.2?

I'm not sure. I think it would be worth opening another thread if you can't figure it out. Honestly, most of the fun for me in stuff like this is getting the hardware working; once I do, I tend to lose interest and move on to the next thing I want to try to get working...

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Yep, makes sense, I'll probably post to OS9Lives, that's where I found reference to MacPortrait, which is from the 7.1 days and has a list of resolutions to match, nothing current apparently. Looks like @Bolle worked it over to bring it up to 9.x compatibility, so that'll be great on the older gear with lower resolutions.

Signing off here. Nice work, brother.

 

[evanboonie]

Card #1 is the black Sapphire board, which is referred to as the ATI reference design on The Mac Elite and elsewhere.
View attachment 93749

Hey, this is really cool work! I thought about making this mod to one of mine a while back but it never made it to the top of my project stack.

Is there any chance you have a dump of the original PC ROM on the black card? I've lost mine in a move and I want to convert one back to a PC card for use in another project.

 

[obsolete]

Hey, this is really cool work! I thought about making this mod to one of mine a while back but it never made it to the top of my project stack.

Is there any chance you have a dump of the original PC ROM on the black card? I've lost mine in a move and I want to convert one back to a PC card for use in another project.

Thanks! I just checked that card and its ROM chip is an ST 25P05V6, which means I did not pull off the original ROM chip and replace it, but rather overwrote the PC ROM with the full Mac ROM. So the PC ROM is gone; sorry about that. I have not been very careful about archiving vintage PC stuff, but perhaps I should be.

The 25P05V6 chips, despite being marked as 512kbit, will take 1Mbit of data about 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time, writing beyond 512kbit seems to kill the chip, which is probably why they were marked as 512kbit to begin with. Seems like they are actually from a 1Mbit lot with a high defect rate.

There's a good chance that one of the ROMs here will work for you (see the Bios link near the bottom of the page):

VGA Legacy MKIII - ATI Radeon 9250

Entry level card of year 2004. Based on Radeon 9200. Card is based on RV280 core, having mostly 64MB or 128MB memory on 128-bit bus, some cards have only 64-bit bus though. Card is basically Radeon 9200 with 10MHz lower clock on GPU. Zaatharen's cards: Gigabyte GV-R925128VH - This...

www.vgamuseum.info

Or perhaps this one:

GeCube GC-R9250LPCI-C3

Get info, images and drivers for the GeCube GC-R9250LPCI-C3 expansion card

theretroweb.com