- Radeon Conversion
- The inspiration
- A while back a German forum reported a success at flashing a PC Radeon 7000 to work on a Mac. For those of you who don't pay attention to Video Cards for the Mac, the PC version of this card sells for $40 on eBay or with rebate at CompUSA. The Mac version sells for a mere $130. This is proof that developers don't care about Mac users. Expecialy as the cards are nearly identical except for a few missing marts
- The first plan
- I had been thinking about getting a Radeon 7000 card to experiment with, but never did. When this came up I could only think of CompUSA's rebate on the card and the fact that if the Phoenix ever gets a G3 upgrade its going to want a new video card. Didn't take too long to put 2 and 2 together. I quickly planned to get the card
- The realization
- Before getting the card someone on Applefritter asked if I could report the number of ports my card has, as the Mac version has 3 ports and the PC version has various numbers depending on the version. Time for some more math, PC card + unsupported ROMs = unsupported card. Mac Card - unsuported card = a few ports and some supporting electronics and a warrenty. Hacker fairly skilled with a soldering iron + unsupported card missing ports = hack potential.
- Supporting material
- I'm probably crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm going in with a pile of parts I don't have. So after buying my card last week I asked for someone with the Mac card from Ati to image it and email the files to me. Thankfully "The_Red_Baron" on Applefritter's Forums got out his card and got some images of that card to go with my scans of the PC card I got. Here they are:
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Top of the Mac Radeon
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Top of the PC Radeon
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Bottom of the Mac Radeon
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Bottom of the PC Radeon
- More images from The_Red_Baron:
- Closeup of parts missing on PC card (this is a Mac card) LARGE, 1.6 MB
- Better image of Mac card, top
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Better image of Mac card, bottom
- As you can see it looks like there arn't many parts missing, maybe a dozen for the S-Video out, more for the DVI. Best of all nothing wild like an IC. At worst a few tansistors that would need to be tested to be identified.
- The results
- Stage 1:
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Finaly got around to flashing the Radeon and it works fine. On my OptiQuest Monitor (native VGA connector) I managed to get past 2000x1100 pixels at Millions of colors (hint: thats really good). After that I took a look at the images again and I might be able to get most of the parts easily. Cheap PC video cards are your friend. I'm checking on a few values but I suspect I'll be able to scavenge those. The only real problem I see is the S-Video port that I want to enable. Maybe this will force me into getting that order to Digi-Key in the foreseeable future, Maybe.
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Stage 2:
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The second part of this project is waiting for tools, not lack of intrest. I would love to make my card have at least s-video out but I'm at a stand still until I can get a multiport card as well as the tools to measure the parts that need replacing. Thats probably another $80 so I'm not in a rush to finish this off.
