OpenGL on os 9.1 / PM8500 / radeon

[lobust]

I have an original radeon mac edition (not 7000, and I don't think it's a flashed pc card, but it doesn't actually say mac on it anywhere...) in my 8500/150.

I have both the original CPU and a 300Mhz Mach speed G3, but neither have any obvious impact/effect on the issue below.

I cannot get opengl games to work properly/at all. Rave games work perfectly.

First off, there is a logic board issue, whereby it thinks there is a tv plugged in all the time, see thread on that here.

This seems to be adjacent to, rather than part of the problem, as GLQuake in particular crashes immediately with a type 2 error on launch normally, but if I disable the sixty6 video using @joevt method in that thread, it launches, provided that I set thousands of colours before I try and launch it. However, it hangs before it starts playing the demo and requires a forced reboot.

Descent II GL launches and works through the menus, but crashes with a type 12 error before it gets to in-game. This behaviour is not changed by disabling/not disabling the sixty6 video, or anything else that I can find.

I downloaded the smallest simplest GL game I could find called BilliardsGL. It does launch and run, if I preselect 640x480x16, but it has a rendering artifact where the balls turn oval - Idk if that's just a bug in that game or if it indicates an issue on my system.

I have tried several different ogl versions, using the march 2002 ati retail drivers.

I'm pretty sure that once the sixty6 video is disabled it's no longer involved, and with rave working properly I'm sceptical that there's an issue with the card, so really I feel like this is a software issue - is there a magic combo that works on this era of hardware/os?

I don't have another pci ppc mac on hand here to prove the card is ok unfortunately - I have a G3MT but it's half the country away at my old house rn...

 

[obsolete]

I feel like this is probably a software issue too, and one that I have no experience with, but for what it's worth...

I also have one of these cards, and I had a weird issue with it in OS X where the cursor would sometimes appear corrupted. Updating the firmware on the card fixed it. So although it's likely unrelated, these cards did have some bugs in their earlier firmware. I'm not sure whether the firmware updater is on Macintosh Garden or elsewhere. If it's not, and you want to try, I can post it this evening (US time).

 

[lobust]

I feel like this is probably a software issue too, and one that I have no experience with, but for what it's worth...

I also have one of these cards, and I had a weird issue with it in OS X where the cursor would sometimes appear corrupted. Updating the firmware on the card fixed it. So although it's likely unrelated, these cards did have some bugs in their earlier firmware. I'm not sure whether the firmware updater is on Macintosh Garden or elsewhere. If it's not, and you want to try, I can post it this evening (US time).

Thanks, i had a look on the garden and didn't find a firmware update for this card, so if you don't mind sharing that would be cool - I may or may not use it as I will never run osx on this machine, but if I've got it I can do a bit of research about it when I have some spare time!

 

[Phipli]

Thanks, i had a look on the garden and didn't find a firmware update for this card, so if you don't mind sharing that would be cool - I may or may not use it as I will never run osx on this machine, but if I've got it I can do a bit of research about it when I have some spare time!

Probably the one here :

Ati drivers for Mac OS Classic

gona.mactar.hu

 

[lobust]

Probably the one here :

Ati drivers for Mac OS Classic

gona.mactar.hu

Thanks for that link, very useful! Lots of files there that aren't on the garden or elsewhere...

I finally got it working and played a little GLQuake last night with good results, the magic combo was:

• Mac OS 9.0 fresh install
• The ATI RADEON Mac Edition Installer 1.1.1 from the site linked above
• Virtual memory turned on at 128Mb*
• The sixty6 video / TV out disabled in open firmware

* I have 112Mb of physical ram installed which I assumed was plenty, but in the readme from the ati installer there was a note that for anything less than 128Mb, opengl usually requires virtual memory to be turned on. I suspect that this was probably the real show stopper before.

I don't imagine the OS downgrade was particularly necessary, but I needed to do a fresh install anyway as I first tried 9.2.1 with OS 9 Helper and it was very unstable for some reason.

I do have a new problem now that I need to figure out, in that the Mach Speed G3 software that worked perfectly in 9.1 causes freezes in 9.0, so the system is only stable with the extension and control panel disabled. I will try some older versions, and if that fails do the 9.1 update again and hope that ogl still works!

 

[lauland1]

FYI The extensions and control panels that come with g3 and g4 accelerators tend to be for enabling the cache on the cards, as classic MacOS doesn't know how to do so on those class machines.

So you are probably running much slower without them. Could be an issue with the drivers or the OpenGL version, and/or virtual memory. It may sound strange, but you may want to try removing some memory, things might not have been tested well with that much.

 

[feeef]

I suggest you always keep Virtual Memory off for better results. You should be able to increase the amount of real RAM in your Mac. Your 8500 can go up to 1GB!

You never have too much RAM! Especially for playing this kind of 3D games.

The 8500 accepts interleaved RAM which increases performances even more as it accesses memory on a 128bit data path. To interleave memory, you need to populate RAM slots in pair of identical sticks. For example, the A1 slot should feature the exact same RAM stick as B1, same for A2, and B2 etc. Don't leave any non paired stick in the computer.

 

[lobust]

FYI The extensions and control panels that come with g3 and g4 accelerators tend to be for enabling the cache on the cards, as classic MacOS doesn't know how to do so on those class machines.

So you are probably running much slower without them. Could be an issue with the drivers or the OpenGL version, and/or virtual memory. It may sound strange, but you may want to try removing some memory, things might not have been tested well with that much.

I installed a newer version of the mach speed software and it's working normally. Weird that the older version works in 9.1 but not 9.0, but...

I suggest you always keep Virtual Memory off for better results. You should be able to increase the amount of real RAM in your Mac. Your 8500 can go up to 1GB!

You never have too much RAM! Especially for playing this kind of 3D games.

The 8500 accepts interleaved RAM which increases performances even more as it accesses memory on a 128bit data path. To interleave memory, you need to populate RAM slots in pair of identical sticks. For example, the A1 slot should feature the exact same RAM stick as B1, same for A2, and B2 etc. Don't leave any non paired stick in the computer.

The issue is that the 5v buffered dimm modules required by these macs are getting kind of scarce. There are odd sticks on ebay, but like you said it needs to be installed in pairs for interleaving.

When I got it was fully loaded with 8MB dimms, and I replaced two of them with 32MB dimms for the 112MB I have installed. I found and bought another pair of 32MB ones on ebay.de a week or so ago, but they haven't arrived yet.

 

[feeef]

I see what you mean! It is sometime easier to buy another Power Mac to get the RAM from it, but you rarely know what you get in those machines for sale.

If you keep checking from time to time, you may find another pair of 32MB sticks. That would bring the total to 256MB, which starts to be comfortable. I remember buying my 9500 back in 1999 with 256MB of RAM, which was a great amount at the time! So you should be able to run any software from that era pretty smoothly. Even games.

 

[lauland1]

Another thing is that sometimes the extensions meant for other g3/g4 cards will work almost generically (since they are mostly just enabling caches), for hardware they were not meant for, so that is something to try, if you have problems with the extensions that came with your card.

Some extensions will patch open firmware, and that part may or may not work on cards not intended. At worse, it may cause crashes, so don't do this unless you need to.

Oh yeah...and once the extensions run once, the caches are on, I believe they will stay on until you power cycle. So if you have the extensions enabled and reboot, and then disable the extensions, the caches may still be on.