Odd Radeon 9250 flashing issues

I have a couple of PCI Radeon 9250 cards that I've flashed with the reduced Mac ROM from TheMacElite wiki, and they're both having the same bizarre issue. One is a black reference board and I've done the resistor mod (forgot at first and just got garbled video out of it, better after the mod), the other isn't a reference board and seems to work without modding.

I've popped both cards into the PCI slot of an MDD with and without any other video card in the system, 10.4.11 installed. Everything seems fine at first. Apple symbol and loading wheel pop up, but when the OS loading bar appears, colors are shifted. Red looks blue, and blue becomes pink/purple. These both worked fine in Windows 7 as I checked them out there first. If I use VGA, the cards will just give me the weirdly-tinted video. If I use DVI, the cards will give me the tinted video and the video will blink off for 2-3 seconds, then come back on for a bit, then randomly go off again and repeat, and this starts right away at the initial loading screen, not after the driver is loaded. VGA is locked at 640x480 resolution, DVI is locked at the native resolution of the monitor, and in both cases no other resolutions are available. Quartz Extreme is not supported, though it should be since 10.4 stopped caring about PCI vs AGP on QE after later versions. Oddly, both cards show 256MB VRAM even though one is a 128MB card and one is 256MB. Clocks look correct.

If it was just one then I'd think I had a bum card, but two? That's more than a bit weird. Maybe the ROM on TME is bad? Has anyone seen anything like this?

And oh, my kingdom for either someone being able to update TME or someone to make a big ol' wiki to cover new info/files/roms/etc on video card flashing along with the other madlad antics that folks get up to with old Macs. So much information is scattered all over the place...
 

Byrd

Well-known member
Hi,

Radeon 9250 were not overly popular cards to flash in "the day", owing to the wild amount of different revisions of GPU core and memory used. Check your core model and RAM speeds to see if it corresponds with the available Mac ROMs and ROM size. Radeon 7000 cards, while still as cheap, do fare better and not really much slower.

Regarding resolutions, ATI released some early OS X drivers that should hopefully allow you to increase resolutions.

 
I checked the core/memory clocks prior to flashing and they matched up with the ROM, which shows the same clocks in ATIcellerator. They're both RV280 cores. I'd forgotten about the ATI Displays control panel, so I'll toss that in and see what happens. It's been so long since I mucked around with flashing cards for PPC Macs. If they just didn't work that would be one thing, but I've never heard of this bizarre color/DVI/resolution issue, and it's really strange seeing it on two different cards at once.
 
Success! The control panel fixed numerous issues, even the flickering DVI. Resolutions, correct colors, but still no QE, and oddly the 256MB card is reporting 128MB of RAM and the 128MB card is reporting 64MB, but I guess that's better than it believing there's to much. In retrospect I should've remembered that the ROM reduction creates a reliance on the ATI Rom XTender, correct?
 

Byrd

Well-known member
There is a utility called PCI extreme that forces QE on PCI GPUs - worth a shot. Glad it’s working with the drivers.
 

DarthNvader

Well-known member
If you install Developer Tools OpenGL Drive Monitor will show you Free VRAM and VRAM in use, from the Perimeters button.

That way you can see if it's just reporting the wrong VRAM size to ASP or you need to dig deeper.

It's not uncommon for some cards to misreport to ASP but all the VRAM is fully functional.
 
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