Looking for Formac ProMedia 40 ROM Rip

stynx said:

@45ns: EDO 17ns = 59MHz
@40ns: EDO 15ns = 67MHz
@35ns: EDO 14ns = 71MHz
@30ns: EDO 12ns = 83MHz
@25ns: EDO 10ns = 100MHz

Click to expand...

Urgh, so extrapolating the 60ns VRAM boards should be about 48MHz. Nasty. Hopefully the main chips are all the same grade and you can just swap in better VRAM.

Worth avoiding the 50 and 60ns cards though because they all basically cost the same, but it isn't worth buying replacement VRAM.

Phipli said:

Bleh, I always forget that this era of stuff isn't just a machine code binary. That's a pain.

Click to expand...

I think Forth is easier to read than machine code or assembly. My script converts fcode to Forth such that the reverse process should produce the same fcode (or slightly better fcode since my tokenizer uses single byte fcodes for the constants -1,0,1,2,3 instead of 5 byte literals).

Phipli said:

I know this is probably a daft question, but is there a more comprehensive resource for OpenFirmware anywhere? All I have ever found are partial lists of common commands. I can navigate, modify NV stuff and poke around a bit, but I've never seen a "Learn how to make an OpenFirmware Forth Driver in 12 easy steps" book or anything similar.

Click to expand...

Apple has some sample Open Firmware drivers in their PCI DDKs.
There's some links at https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Open_Firmware
MacRumors has some Open Firmware related threads.
There's more links at https://wiki.osdev.org/Open_Firmware
Looks like https://www.devicetree.org/open-firmware/home.html has all the documents. Start with the IEEE 1275-1994 spec. Then PCI bindings. The16 color binding, 64 bit extensions (useful for G5?). etc.

Phipli said:

Also, I'm getting strong "you need to go and grab one of your Beige G3's" vibes

Click to expand...

I hope to port it to older Macs such as my Power Mac 8600. It would be nice to include the Firewire Target Disk Mode code so I can connect all the drives in my Power Mac 8600 (including SCSI) to my modern Mac.

Phipli said:

Should be GA-6 : it is a 2MB version of the S3 Virge card.

Click to expand...

stynx said:

The ProMedia 20 and ProMedia 40 are the 2 and 4Mb Versions of the first Batch of cards (Rom version 1.0.6).

Click to expand...

So the ProMedia 20 and 40 are both GA-6.

joevt said:

So the ProMedia 20 and 40 are both GA-6.

Click to expand...

Correct

The one thing to catch you out is the "ProMedia 3D Pro" is entirely different - that is a PerMedia 2 based card that they didn't make for very long.

joevt said:

These ROMs have a pong game for Open Firmware:

Code:

GA5-ROM 1.5.6:CS_C852
GA5-ROM 1.5.7:CS_7087
GA5-ROM 1.8.0:CS_805D
GA6-ROM 1.2.6:CS_2876
GA7-ROM 1.6.5:CS_2670
GA8-ROM 1.7.0:CS_7265
GA8-ROM 1.7.2:CS_F187
GA8-ROM 1.7.6:CS_7277
GA8-ROM 1.8.0:CS_F548
GA10-ROM 1.6.4
GA10-ROM 1.6.9
GA10-ROM 1.7.1
GA10-ROM 1.7.2
GA10-ROM 1.7.3
GA10-ROM 1.7.4
GA10-ROM 1.8.0
GA10MT-ROM 1.6.4
GA10MT-ROM 1.7.1
ProFormance II Light v1.76

Click to expand...

Have you a way to try that ? I will be fun to play pong on the open firmware from a graphic card

Dandu said:

Have you a way to try that ? I will be fun to play pong on the open firmware from a graphic card

Click to expand...

I extracted the code. To load the code:

On a Mac with a serial port:
- Type dl command to begin download.
- Paste the contents of the .4th file.
- Press Control-D to end the download. It executes the contents which in this case just adds words to the Open Firmware dictionary.

The dl command is nice because you can disable text pacing without it missing any characters.
A normal paste to Open Firmware using serial port requires a delay between characters because Open Firmware will often through away characters if more than 14 at a time are pasted.
dl works by accepting characters in a very tight loop and does not echo the characters back to the console which makes it faster.

On a Mac that supports loading a file in Open Firmware, you can use the load command to load either the .4th (Forth) file or the .fc (fcode) file.

Then open the gpu (doesn't need to be a Formac GPU). e.g. For Beige G3: " pci/@12" select-dev

Then do pong

Keys:
player 1 up:A down:Z
player 2: up:' down:/
new game: esc
end game: delete

The Forth file is 18,484 characters.
The fcode file is 3,727 bytes.

For a Power Mac 7500,8500,8600, the Open Firmware graphics driver for the built-in video requires a small patch to work correctly.