GFX cards flashable?

[JRL]

I have

-a combo sound/PS2/VGA card. It has a Winbond chipset.

-two Matrox cards with DB-15/VGA. They have a MGA chipset and are labeled 1996 and 1997 respectively.

-two Diamond Multimedia cards. One has a S3 Trio64 chipset; the other has a Rendition chipset. They are both labeled 1994 and 1997 and are VGA only.

Are these flashable?

 

[Bolle]

i´d say none of your cards is flashable to mac...

they may be if youre aware of how to write your own OF ROM and Mac OS drivers for teh chipsets

 

[JRL]

I also have a 3COM EtherLink III card. Are there Mac drivers for this?

 

[coius]

I also have a 3COM EtherLink III card. Are there Mac drivers for this?

Probably only in OS X. I haven't seen ANY 3com drivers out there for classic.

 

[Franklinstein]

Some Intel 10/100/1000bT NICs work as early as OS X 10.2. I use one in my beige G3. Doesn't work in OS 9, though.

Actually, your Matrox cards may have had Mac counterparts. Many of the Matrox-branded Millenium and Millenium II cards can be flashed to work on a Mac, but some of the OEM versions have too small of a Flash/EEPROM chip to be able to fit the whole Mac ROM, so they won't work.

 

[Unknown_K]

Matrox Millenium PCI cards have mac drivers and BIOS available.

 

[JRL]

My Matrox cards happen to be the smaller types, not the Milleniums. They were all pulled from Pentium-era PCs.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

About the only video cards known to be Mac-flashable are nVidia GeForce chipset cards.

The others have the problem that there were NEVER Mac versions, so where would you get Mac ROMs for them? (Not to mention a complete lack of drivers.) The Winbond and S3 chipets for sure. The Matrox chipset might be the equivalent of a Millenium, but I wouldn't go mucking around. It's not like those chipsets are significantly more powerful than the onboard video of any PCI Mac.

 

[Franklinstein]

3dfx's Voodoo cards (at least the Voodoo 3 and 4) were shipped as flashable to either platform. The drivers and utilities were once available on 3dfx's website. I doubt nVidia kept any of them around, though. I'm using a Voodoo3 in one of my G3s, flashed over from PC, and it was no hassle and works great.

The Voodoo5 is a bit different, I think. I have the Mac version. I've never seen the PC version, but apparently only the Mac version has DVI plus VGA, the PC model has dual VGA.

AFAIK, no nVidia card will work in a Mac prior to the GeForce2, simply because there were no Mac products available prior to that. Some PC GeForce2 or better cards will work in Macs, but some won't. It depends.

Several ATI cards, such as those with Mach 64 and Rage 128-based chipsets, were shipped with Macs, and some similar PC models are flashable. The Rage 128 models are pretty straight-forward, actually. Other ATI products, though they were used in Macs (such as the RADEON 7500, etc), aren't flashable from PC. Some are, but most aren't.

I don't think Apple ever used any S3 or Trident graphics solutions, nor do I recall any being available for Mac, so I wouldn't even try with those. Other brands Apple used, such as Chips & Technologies and Western Digital, were typically only used in PowerBooks, as their products were usually specifically designed to drive LCDs.