I never flashed an AIW, but I've flashed a "million" 8500's, I'm the founder of the Mac Elite, and a moderator at Strangdogs. Very few people know more than I do about flashing video cards to the Mac.( Atri and the Rominator ).
did you mean to say "Arti" ? i guess that makes you responsible for most of the rom files here: http://themacelite.wikidot.com/wikidownloads2
do u have any experience shrinking Firmware (such as the firmware for the Sil3112 from the Seritek 1S2)
Yes, Arti Itra, and that's not me, he is really the brain behind most of what we know about Fcode Rom's.
It was a team effort, me and Joe Van Tunen really started Mac Flashing of ATI cards back at the old Xpostfacto forums, but I had an old Geforce 2MX PCI card I wanted to get working in my Powermac 8600.
Someone figured out how to flash a PC 7000 to Mac, as the ATIFlash.exe would not flash the full 128k rom to the card. Then I figured out how to flash a PC 8500. Then ATI sent out a bad update for the Mac 8500 and bricked a bunch of retail 8500's so they had to make a flasher that would flash a card with a bad eeprom. That made it so anyone could flash a PC 8500 in their mac, with no need for a PC.
Ebay blew up with people selling flashed 7000/8500's.
Then ATI started putting 64k eeprom on their retail PC cards and had all the board venders do it, so people couldn't flash them.
sprinter figured out how to remove the 'NDRV' from ATI cards so they were less then 64k.
I went on about getting my Geforce 2 working.
So while later people figured out how to flash a PC9800 to Mac. I ran across the Strangdogs forum in my searches for Nvidia Roms. People were flashing ATI cards, and some Geforce cards, but knowone knew how to edit the BMP. So I took what I had learned of it, and Hexedit, and edited, and edited, and flashed, and flashed(nvflash) until I got a working PC 5200 in may Sawtooth.
Once we knew that, we could turn any Geforce card into a Mac card.
People started stealing our work, that we stole from nvidia, and selling them on Ebay.
Now that there is no market for people to sell flashed cards for PPC Mac's, mostly because you can't buy those old cards new in enough numbers to make any money. I'm trying to get the Rom Makers Arti's wrote added to the mac elite wiki.
It's an OS X app, you just drop a PC nvidia rom on it, and it spits you out a Mac Rom.
We'll have to see how that goes, it's not up to me, really it's up to Arti.........