Pete said...most of post sniped ;-)
Another explanation is that maybe half the rom is no longer writeable or locked - unlikely though.....interesting little problem.....and I was just about to try the 9000+ series...
A number of people have had luck with 9000+ cards but I don't really need one at this time.But I'm sure there would be a market for them . No telling how long the cards which can be flashed will be available. Not long I'd guess at this point.
From: Jeff Walther <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>I understand this well. There's only so many hours in the day and never enough time ;-) I picked up a very clean Power Tower Pro almost for free! i've got an Electronics junk store 6 blocks from my house and every now and then they have some great stuff. Also have a lot of small odd parts but you have to do a lot of looking. Most of the stuff I have no idea what it's for. I don't really like Tower machines which is why I have the J700 but would like having the 6 PCI slots that all work correctly! I've not yet checked how hard it would be to put the Power motherboard in the J700. I know it will fit but will the Umax power supply work with it or will the Power power supply fit in the Umax box? Can I figure out how to live with a Tower machine ....One day i'll sort it out. Sorry for wondering from the topic.
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 17:31:33 -0600
At 02:52 -0800 12/05/2003, Will S wrote:
Will, thanks for the link. I've just read the most recent three pages and it is very interesting. I have a couple of ideas I may wish to contribute, but I think I may want to try a few experiments first.
One idea is that the memory (flash) space on the cards may be partly in the ATI chip. That is, there could be 64K of flash space on the ATI chip and the separate flash chip is supplementing that. I consider this very unlikely, but it would explain the possibility of only 64K of flash being accessible and the apparently mismarked chips (not actually mismarked if this hypothesis were correct) and the 'lock' issue. The memory in the ATI chip would be the bit that is locked.
A second idea is to just desolder the flash from one of the cards that Pete sent me, put it on my EEPROM programming machine, and see what it has to say about the chip. This would have the added benefit that while the chip is on there, I can read out the Mac firmware which Pete put on the card, which might have applications for flashing other cards. One obstacle is that I do not have an 8 pin SOIC socket for my EEPROM programmer, and the socket adapters are about $150 each. I may be able to rig something up though, if the serial EEPROM also comes in a DIP package.
I believe you got your
cards from Pete just after I did. I can tell you mine flashed and runs just
great! So we likely got the good batch with mislabeled chips!
I believe that is correct. Pete flashed mine for me which is why I've never felt any need to test them. I want to install them some day, of course, but I don't have a top two slot available. I bought them before I was ready to use them, because we had no way of knowing how long the flashable Saphire cards would be available. I think that has worked out well, given recent events.
I really need to get one of the SIIG 133 cards to replace my VST card, I guess, which would free up a top slot for the R7000. But I'd also like to get one of my Power Tower Pro motherboards back into service and replace the S900 board in this box with that, so instead of doing either, I've done neither and the R7000s stay in the box...
One fellow (PartyMarty) on the forum offered to send folks the 128K chips, so he apparently has a supply. I don't know what he's charging for it though. I'm tempted to email him and ask. My Digi-Key catalog suggests that those chips should cost about $6 - $10 each but Digi-Key is always on the high end compared to ordering from a regular distributer--but they sell smaller quantities.
Anyway, it sounds like folks who can solder adn get a hold of the 128K chips are not out of luck, though I'd like to see more reports of chip replacement and this "Lock" issue before being certain of that. Because I have two cards with the apparently mislabeled serial flash chips, I may try to confirm that mislabeling theory.
Jeff Walther
One thing about the Maclife forum. Every so often they delete some posts to make more room for new posts. It's usually older pages but they also seem to delete more english posts then German. So don't count on things being there forever 43 seems to be about the limit for the number of pages they keep.
This forum is where I got the info to flash the Sapphire cards way back (those early posts are long gone from the forum) and there are a number of helpful and smart people there. There are also some very bright people there with perhaps tunnel vision. Several people talked about this idea of flash roms with locked flash portions and were working on a fix for this road block, The cards they were working on were Power Color and Hercules brand.If they had bothered to read other posts on the forum they would have known that the SDR RAM cards they were trying to flash were very unlikely to work because they needed to have DDR RAM in oder to flash and run in a Mac. Power Color 7000 cards with DDR RAM have only shown up about the time the Sapphire cards quite being flashable and the Hercules 7000 cards no one has yet seen any with DDR RAM. So people have been doing a lot of work on cards that they should have known were the wrong cards to be working on. So you do have to be careful who's ideas you are following ;-)
Clearly some changes have been made in the cards and I know from "Bruno the jerks" posts that ATI is doing everything possible to end this PC card flashing to Mac. I can't image there would be all that much demand for these cards on a PC. PC users who are building machines and upgrading are going to be going for newer and larger RAM and most likely AGP slot cards not PCI. ATI maybe surprised to see a ton of unsold PC cards or not? I have no idea how many people are flashing PC to Mac. i think that the 9000 series Mac cards which sell for $400.00 and can be bought as PC clone cards for $179.00 is what has freaked them out. later Will S
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