Geforce4 Titanium Rom Maker

[darthnVader]

A little to report about the Geforce4/Quadro 4, as far as the Device ID.

We can Hard Mod the Device ID for cards that don't work with the OS 9 drivers.

Check you card first to ensure your device id is not already supported by OS 9's drivers. I know for a fact that 0x025b is supported under OS 9 without the need to mod the device ID.

On the back of the card locate R961-R963, remove any resisters from R963 and R961 and place one of them at R962. That will give a Device ID of 0x0250( Geforce 4 Ti 4600 ). This will enable any NV25 GPU to work with the OS 9 drivers.

Keep in mind, if you mod a Quadro ID to a Geforce you would lose any support under OS X for the Stereo 3D mini din, as OS X has Quadro drivers and it did support Stereo 3D.

Stereo 3D has never been tested on a Quadro 4 under OS X, so it may not work anyway, but when I get a chance I'll test it and see.

[ICCRRP]

The Rom Maker got my ti 4200 128MB running again (a while ago I had manually got the rom working in macOS.. then flashed it back to PC after switching it with a geforce 5200 256MB which was a flashed 5500). Now I have my 4200 again yay and can goof around with it in MacOS9 until I figure out how to hack these nvidia drivers to use the 5200. Say the least I feel your pain on trying to figure out how to hack them. I have tried multiple editors, assemblers, and even tried decompiling them with no luck on decoding them. My plan for getting them to work was to see if nvidia holding to its "standards" would have also made the drivers simple. By simply being a this model can do this and this model can do this. Because in nvidia development it is a standardized set of commands and what not that is suppose to directly send information to the GPU, unlike in the past when you had to have a totally different set of instructions to pass the same commands to different cards. The skinny is i would take the highest compatible nvidia card and swap in the 5200 and etc. Than see what happens. If anybody can help me hack up the drivers to do that swap I have the hardware to test it! PowerMac G4 Quicksilver 1GHz Dual Core and a FX5200 256MB

[macStuff]

  Man!  An I'd be looking at well over $100 minimum on eBay for one of these.  Sh*t, DieHard, you just got crazy-lucky!!!

those are inflated prices by money hungry dorks

[macStuff]

what happeend with this ?

[darthnVader]

what happeend with this ?

One of the DVI outputs doesn't work in Digital mode.

So, if you are looking for a Dual DVI card, stick with the Gainwood.

[macStuff]

You got the gainward working?! I forget the details it’s been awhile

[darthnVader]

You got the gainward working?! I forget the details it’s been awhile

Yes, the Gainwood card works DVI-DVI, DVI-VGA, VGA-DVI.

Just feed the PC Bios to the ROM Maker and flash away.

[hagan]

I've got a ti 4200 from an old PC that I'd love to flash for use in my "new" Quicksilver 2001 867 MHz. I've downloaded Arti's awesome nVidia GeForce 4 NV25 GPU ROM Maker Utility, but I'm stuck with no tool to read & write the flash on the ti 4200. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a PC with an AGP slot; I only have the Quicksilver. Does a firmware flasher exist that runs on the PPC Mac (OS 9 or OS X) that can read & write the ti 4200 that currently has the original PC firmware on it?

[darthnVader]

I've got a ti 4200 from an old PC that I'd love to flash for use in my "new" Quicksilver 2001 867 MHz. I've downloaded Arti's awesome nVidia GeForce 4 NV25 GPU ROM Maker Utility, but I'm stuck with no tool to read & write the flash on the ti 4200. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a PC with an AGP slot; I only have the Quicksilver. Does a firmware flasher exist that runs on the PPC Mac (OS 9 or OS X) that can read & write the ti 4200 that currently has the original PC firmware on it?

Sorry, you'll need a PC to flash it.

[hagan]

Fortunately, I contacted a friend who still had an old AGP PC under a desk in working condition. I replaced its dead CMOS battery and failed DVD drive to yield a perfectly working old Windows XP machine.

I put a copy of nvFlash 4.46 onto a bootable floppy I formatted with its Windows XP, rebooted into DOS, and then used nvFlash to save a copy of my GeForce4 Ti 4200's original PC firmware ROM. After transferring the ROM file over to my Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, I used GF Ti ROM Maker to create an Apple firmware image based the PC image. After flashing the Apple ROM image back to the card with nvFlash, I now have a working GeForce4 Ti 4200 under both Mac OS 9 and OS X environments.

Thanks for letting me know I had to find an old AGP PC!

[darthnVader]

Fortunately, I contacted a friend who still had an old AGP PC under a desk in working condition. I replaced its dead CMOS battery and failed DVD drive to yield a perfectly working old Windows XP machine.

I put a copy of nvFlash 4.46 onto a bootable floppy I formatted with its Windows XP, rebooted into DOS, and then used nvFlash to save a copy of my GeForce4 Ti 4200's original PC firmware ROM. After transferring the ROM file over to my Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, I used GF Ti ROM Maker to create an Apple firmware image based the PC image. After flashing the Apple ROM image back to the card with nvFlash, I now have a working GeForce4 Ti 4200 under both Mac OS 9 and OS X environments.

Thanks for letting me know I had to find an old AGP PC!

Back in the day we had a script that could be loaded to build some properties in Open Firmware that would allow nvflash for OS X to flash a PC card.

You had to VNC in to do the flashing, or use a PCI card for video.

Unfortunately, I lost my copy of the script, and have been unable to properly recreate it. It's been on my todo list, as old AGP PC's are getting had to come by.

[kwiatki75]

I've got a ti 4200 from an old PC that I'd love to flash for use in my "new" Quicksilver 2001 867 MHz. I've downloaded Arti's awesome nVidia GeForce 4 NV25 GPU ROM Maker Utility, but I'm stuck with no tool to read & write the flash on the ti 4200. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a PC with an AGP slot; I only have the Quicksilver. Does a firmware flasher exist that runs on the PPC Mac (OS 9 or OS X) that can read & write the ti 4200 that currently has the original PC firmware on it?

Sorry, you'll need a PC to flash it.

Yes, that only way to flash ROM. So i decide to buy a PC with AGP and flash my GF4600Ti. Now i have also working MDD with quickest graphics card for os9 ;-)

[k-Tracker]

Just wondering if there are any known NV25 based cards which support DVI-DL? I'd like to use it with Cinema 30" monitor. Even not at full resolution.

[k-Tracker]

Also, would like to clarify regarding 4200 128MB. Is it supported with OS9 drivers? I found that it arrived with DevID 0x0281. Do drivers support this ID or I need to modify some address resistors too? I haven't yet programmed it with Mac ROM... NVFlashUtility-1.1 under OSX doesn't see this card(checked under VNC).
Waiting for PC board to arrive. 

[ThinkingDifferent]

Hi! I'd like to try this but would appreciate some further information - is the ROM maker utility all you need to flash the card or does this require another program?

[Jubadub]

Were there any breakthroughs in figuring out how to edit supported Device IDs into the Mac OS 9 NVidia drivers since this thread was last updated? While I got a bunch of different Ti4600s already, I also got two 900XGLs and one 750XGL. Hardware-modding their Device ID by changing resistors into an already-supported ID is a cool option to have, because at least it is one option, but I think it goes without saying a software solution, such as getting the NVidia drivers to acknowledge other IDs, is much preferred.

While on-topic, I guess I might emphasize that it seems the 900XGL is as far as OS 9 can currently get in the GPU department, unless brand-new drivers were made for superior cards, which goes way beyond "mere" editing in Device IDs into existing drivers.

Hi! I'd like to try this but would appreciate some further information - is the ROM maker utility all you need to flash the card or does this require another program?

Hi! The ROM maker utility only yields you the ROM you will need for flashing, but won't do the flashing procedure itself. For example, I got a 900XGL ROM and a 750XGL ROM by doing the following:

- Put GPU into an AGP PC, boot into FreeDOS via a USB drive;
- Run flashing program (NVFlash 4.46) with command "nvflash -b romName.rom" to get the PC ROM from it;
- Turn everything off, plug-in USB drive into a PPC Mac-OS-X-compatible Mac (I tried with Tiger), run program, select PC ROM, type in the name of the newly-generated Mac ROM;
- Put Mac ROM back into the USB drive, turn Mac off, put USB drive into the AGP PC, turn AGP PC on, flash the Mac ROM with command "nvflash -5 -6 newRom.rom". (Or is command "nvflash -4 -5 -6 newRom.rom" necessary? Though I think not.)

You can get to see if the program sees/recognizes your GPU with the command "nvflash --list", and see if your GPU is listed there, before flashing.

[ivanshpak]

Hello All!

I have a huge request to share the original ROM for Gainward ti (dual DVI) or Mac ROM for this card

After the firmware, I put the card in G4, and i saw artifacts and osX did not start

The fact is that the ROMmaker utility did not help with the mac ROM.
I returned the backup rum but the card does not start (I see it in the NVflash utility, but there is no picture).
Perhaps the backup.rom was created with an error, I attach it here, the original ROM file

My PC setup
Supermicro P6DBS Motherboard

[DieHard]

After the firmware, I put the card in G4, and i saw artifacts and osX did not start

Kind of sounds like bad VRAM on the card itself... was the card working perfectly before flashing ?

[IIO]

current average ebay prices for ti 4600 (128mb) are > than the prices for GTX 1050 (4000mb) (while "regular" 4MX comes free with broken quicksilvers.)

i´ve given up the idea after all the years, it just doesnt make sense for me. i rather abandone 3D support and use a GF7 to attach bigger monitors.