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[lepidotos]

AIWs can be vastly cheaper than normal 8500s or 8500 LEs, competitive with 9200s. And the integrated TV tuner can be useful for capturing video from '80s home computers, digitizing home movies, or recording console output. However, the hardware differences might make incompatible with a normal Mac ROM. Has anyone ever tested this? All I saw were threads from years ago that never answered the question. If not, I might give doing it myself a go, though it is unfortunate that I just put my Pentium II in storage to be replaced with the Sawtooth.

[darthnVader]

It's "doable" if you want to but the effort into it.

An 8500 is an 8500 in the end of the day, it's really just a matter of the memory timings used.

The AIW used a Phillips analog TV tuner and a Booktree chip that has some support under Mac OS X: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xtv/

Tho there was an 8500DV that was an 8500 with a 1394 sub(PCI) device too.

FCodeUtils has a detok tool to detokenize the 8500's FCode ROM into a more human readable form, then it's just a matter of finding the correct memory timings from the PC VBIOS to edit the FCODE ROM with the correct timings.

https://github.com/openbios/fcode-utils

[lepidotos]

My 9000 Pro fell through (apparently the seller's kid threw it away not knowing it was sold), so I have room, and my $20, for the DV again. I'll take a look at getting everything I can working, and then I'll consider OCing it for the fun of it, at least to 275/275 to match the original 8500. I already wasn't really going to be too hard on it -- Quake 1 and Deus Ex were really the two things I had in mind regarding games, so it might not even need it, but it could always use the extra oomph for Clouded Leopard.

[lepidotos]

So I just took in the 8500DV and instantly fell into a hurdle: my Dell Optiplex GX1 doesn't actually have an AGP port -- the 3D Rage Pro inside of it is integrated and there isn't a spot on the sideways PCI mounter for any AGP graphics, meaning that the only AGP machine I have to be able to flash it is the Power Mac itself.
I would still really like to get the ROM off of it first in order to do as much as I can to preserve the TV tuner aspect, but I have no idea if that's possible from the Mac. I'm fine going to Tiger, since I already have that installed, if it's necessary.

[darthnVader]

So I just took in the 8500DV and instantly fell into a hurdle: my Dell Optiplex GX1 doesn't actually have an AGP port -- the 3D Rage Pro inside of it is integrated and there isn't a spot on the sideways PCI mounter for any AGP graphics, meaning that the only AGP machine I have to be able to flash it is the Power Mac itself.
I would still really like to get the ROM off of it first in order to do as much as I can to preserve the TV tuner aspect, but I have no idea if that's possible from the Mac. I'm fine going to Tiger, since I already have that installed, if it's necessary.

Well, not having a AGP slot on a PC complicates things a bit, do you have a PCI graphics card you can use in your Mac?

It is possible to dump the VBios using LinuxPPC, and you could install LinuxPPC with you Mac AGP card and setup SSH, then boot with the 8500DV headless and use SSH to dump the cards PC VBIOS.

http://smackerelofopinion.blogspot.com/2011/07/using-pci-sysfs-interface-to-dump-video.html

[lepidotos]

Well, not having a AGP slot on a PC complicates things a bit, do you have a PCI graphics card you can use in your Mac?

It is possible to dump the VBios using LinuxPPC, and you could install LinuxPPC with you Mac AGP card and setup SSH, then boot with the 8500DV headless and use SSH to dump the cards PC VBIOS.

http://smackerelofopinion.blogspot.com/2011/07/using-pci-sysfs-interface-to-dump-video.html

No, I don't... I only have PCIe cards, and both are for PCs. As for the headless linux install, would Ubuntu 9.04 work? I downloaded LinuxPPC 2000 but it came in an image format that none of my disk image software can read.

[darthnVader]

Well, not having a AGP slot on a PC complicates things a bit, do you have a PCI graphics card you can use in your Mac?

It is possible to dump the VBios using LinuxPPC, and you could install LinuxPPC with you Mac AGP card and setup SSH, then boot with the 8500DV headless and use SSH to dump the cards PC VBIOS.

http://smackerelofopinion.blogspot.com/2011/07/using-pci-sysfs-interface-to-dump-video.html

No, I don't... I only have PCIe cards, and both are for PCs. As for the headless linux install, would Ubuntu 9.04 work? I downloaded LinuxPPC 2000 but it came in an image format that none of my disk image software can read.

There is a way to test the 8500 headless in and AGP Mac:

This is how to load a Fcode ROM form the hard disk in Open Firmware, while they still have a PC VBios on them. If you want to test a AGP card, it is best to have a Mac PCI video card, but it can be done without one.

We can only boot OS 9 at this time if the card you are testing is nVidia. I'll update this when I test an ATI card.

With a PCI Video card:

Install the latest drivers for the card you want to test.

Open your ROM in Hexedit and remove the PCI Header, everything to 0x40. We shouldn't have to do this, but Apple screwed around with their Open Firmware implementation, so we have to.

Place the Fcode ROM file you want to test in a folder at the root of your drive, name the folder ppc.

Shut Down.

Put in your Mac PCI card, and your PC AGP card into your Mac. Connect a display to both cards, if you have 2 displays, if not connect you display to the PCI card.

Boot into Open Firmware, Command+Opt+O+F. It may take a few seconds as the Mac probes the APG card, then redirects video to the PCI card.

If all goes well, you will be greeted with the Open Firmware prompt.

Now we want to load the FCode Rom we want to test, for this example I named mine GFM.rom, and my hard drive partition number is 10.

Code: [Select]

load hd:10,\ppc\GFM.rom
dev agp/@10
800000 1 byte-load
" agp/@10" open-dev to my-self
800000 1 byte-load
boot hd:10,\\:tbxi

Well, we want to make things a little easier, so we don't have to type commands blind. So what we are going to do is leverage the nvramrc and the boot-command to let us boot to a telnet session without needing to type anything blind.

The nvramrc runs before the system is ready to enter into a telnet session, so we just can't enter telnet at boot from the nvramrc, so we create a custom colon definition in the nvramrc and then we set this new word to be our boot-command.

Code: [Select]

nvedit
: tnio " enet:telnet,10.1.2.3" io ; <press return>
<press ctrl+c to exit the nvramrc editor>
nvstore
setenv use-nvramrc? true
setenv boot-command tnio
reset-all
Now all you have to do is enter a telnet session on a target system.

Code: [Select]

telnet 10.1.2.3
So you can boot your PPC Mac with the 8500DV installed without any other graphics card and control Open Firmware remotely to test the 8500 FCode ROM without changing the PC VBIOS on the card.

[darthnVader]

Just  to be clear, you should be able to test the Mac 8500 ROM on the 8500DV without flashing it, and you should be able to dump the PC ROM from the card using the ATIROMDUMPER from Graphiccelerator 1.3.4.

https://download.cnet.com/Graphiccelerator/3000-2094_4-174182.html

It looks like the FCODE doesn't start at 0x40 in the Mac 8500 ROM, the PCI header is a little longer for some reason. Attached is an edited ROM that should work for testing:

To be clear, setup Mac OS 9 on your machine, put the ATI ROM DUMPER in your Startup Items folder. Setup telnet as I posted before and make sure it works with you video card that has a Mac ROM. Then swap the cards and test the ROM attached to this thread as I described.

Let me know if you have questions or something doesn't work for you.

Also, you can set the IP address in telnet to a valid address within your routers IP range if that makes things easier.

I.E.

Code: [Select]

: tnio " enet:telnet,192.168.1.201" io ;

[chrisNova777]

hope it works out for you 

[darthnVader]

From pictures, it looks like the AIW 8500DV uses DDR SGRAM, that's likely going to be a problem with the Mac ROM. It will need edited for the proper ram timings, and we will have to find the data sheet for the ram or extract it from the PC VBIOS.

Also, I detoked the Mac 8500 ROM and couldn't find the memory timings, so I have no clue what to edit. I was thinking ATI used a binary blob for ram timings, but it looks like we have to step though the forth to find where the ram timings are written.

This isn't a small task, I mean it can be done, but is it, in the end of the day worth it?

I mean AGP Mac's already have Firewire, and the Rage Theater chip used for video capture has no Mac drivers. I couldn't get a straight answer if Video for Linux has the drivers for the Rage Theater chip, so there maybe no code or documentation on how to program driver for it.

Old computer equipment doesn't age like wine, so a very limited supply of cards and people to use them puts thing project on the bottom tear of things to do.

Better off just buying a 9200 AGP and flashing that, then buy a capture device that has Mac drivers if you need to convert old analog TV stuff to digital.