Flashing a 9800 pro over VNC

[mode11]

Hi guys. I finally picked up an Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer for my 9800pro recently, but unfortunately seem to have buggered up the card fitting it. The screen now has a lot of artefacts, mostly in vertical rows. I suspect I tightened the rear screws too hard and the pressure flexed the PCB, cracking a few BGA solder balls under the GPU. The GPU physically looks fine.

Anyhow, I intend to flash another 9800 card to Mac, by VNCing into my QS G4. I understand this is best done under Tiger, which doesn’t have a built in screen sharing server, so I installed Vine Server. Remoting into the QS, which still has the broken 9800 in it, the VNC window has the exact same garbled display as viewing the monitor directly.

is there any way around this? I guess VNC is just reading directly from the corrupted frame buffer (the GPU’s connection to one or more VRAM chips is likely disrupted)?

Can the G4 run without a GPU? People have flashed PC cards through VNC, where presumably the GPU is completely non-functional at that point, so I assume so. Or are they using a second, PCI GPU?

 

[DearthnVader]

Tiger has it's own VNC server you just have to turn it on in the sharing preferences, it's buried a few clicks deep in the Apple Remote Desktop settings.

System Preferences>Sharing>Apple Remote Desktop>Access Privileges>VNC viewers may control screen with password

Yes you can boot a QuickSilver without graphics card installed, or a PC graphics card installed in the PCI or AGP slots, that's how we flash ATI cards.

I think only the 2005 G5's with PCI-E require a Mac FCode ROM video card to boot.

I think you need another vintage Mac to connect with screen sharing( VNC ), I can't seem to login to my Tiger Mac's with Big Sur, likely has to do with the way the password is sent. If you have another Mac on your network running Tiger or an older Mac OS X, I use Chicken of the VNC to connect.

 

[mode11]

Thanks for the good info. I've got a few PPC machines around, so will use one of those to remote in.

The 9800 I've got is an SE, so I'll initially flash a Mac-compatible SE ROM to it. Once tested as working, would it be safe to try the 9800 non-pro BIOS on it, with the hope of unlocking all 8 pipelines? Is that all that's required? It's a Sapphire 256-bit, 128MB card with an R360 core and 64KB flash chip.

I understand there's only a 50% chance of it working, since many will be based on defective chips. If it produces artefacts, could I simply reflash it back to an SE using the Mac? Or would a PC then be required? I assume not.

 

[DearthnVader]

Thanks for the good info. I've got a few PPC machines around, so will use one of those to remote in.

The 9800 I've got is an SE, so I'll initially flash a Mac-compatible SE ROM to it. Once tested as working, would it be safe to try the 9800 non-pro BIOS on it, with the hope of unlocking all 8 pipelines? Is that all that's required? It's a Sapphire 256-bit, 128MB card with an R360 core and 64KB flash chip.

I understand there's only a 50% chance of it working, since many will be based on defective chips. If it produces artefacts, could I simply reflash it back to an SE using the Mac? Or would a PC then be required? I assume not.

I didn't do the work on the ATI ROMs, so I can't say, but best bet is to just flash the ROM for the SE.