ATI Radeon 8500LE = a FireGL 8700! \ VOGONS

ATI Radeon 8500LE = a FireGL 8700!

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First post, by retro games 100

Posted on 2010-01-21, 18:02

retro games 100 Offline

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I bought an ATI Radeon 8500LE on ebay, and could not install the ATI catalyst 6.2 Windows 98 driver for it. When I run the setup.exe, it says it can't find a suitable graphics card. I then run Everest Home Edition, and the GPU is listed as "FireGL". I look up this card on the net, and discover it's a FireGL 8700 model. The problem is that this card does not have a Windows 98 driver. The FireGL 8700's "core" is 8500LE, but it's still a FireGL card, and not a 8500LE card.

Can I flash this FireGL card's BIOS, in order to transform it in to a 8500LE? If this is possible, I might be able to install the ATI Windows 98 catalyst driver for it.

Reply 1 of 6, by elianda

Posted on 2010-01-21, 18:30

elianda Offline

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How about replacing the Device ID in the INF file?

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Reply 2 of 6, by DosFreak

Posted on 2010-01-21, 18:46

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Might be better off asking at an ATI specific forum like rage3d.

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Reply 3 of 6, by Arctic

Posted on 2016-11-06, 19:51

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I know this topic is ancient! But I have the exact same card.
The memory is Hynix 3.6ns and it overclocks easily with the stock cooling solution to 295/276.

I tried flashing it with the 8500 BIOS from TechPowerUp with no success.
After finding out that the latest FireGL 8700 drivers have no OpenGL support enabled, I tried older "fgl" drivers for Windows 2000 and OpenGL worked again! But the older driver is slightly slower in D3D.

Now I am trying Elianda's tip to mod the INF of the regular Catalyst drivers to get full Radeon 8500 compatibility. Then I will see what the final clockspeed of the card should be.

Reply 4 of 6, by Arctic

Posted on 2016-11-07, 14:56

Arctic Offline

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elianda wrote:
How about replacing the Device ID in the INF file?

I need advice!
Can someone help me with this? 😵

Reply 5 of 6, by s0ren

Posted on 2016-11-07, 16:48

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Have you tried manually choosing a 8500LE when installing the driver in windows 98 device manager?

Reply 6 of 6, by Arctic

Posted on 2016-11-07, 17:18

Arctic Offline

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Thank you for your reply! 😀
Yes, I tried to install it as a regular 8500LE, 8500 with no luck.
I also tried to "infuse" the FireGL 8700 string from the FireGL drivers into the Catalyst INF file.

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