Ozzuneoj wrote on 2018-05-20, 03:02:Awesome! That is a fantastic utility... very easy to use once installed. Just FYI to others, the nssi060.exe program is actuall […]
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KCompRoom2000 wrote:Ozzuneoj wrote:I just checked the Stealth 3D 2000 Pro I have, and it actually has the 3.04 BIOS (its identical to this card, except 4 of the memory modules are in sockets). What is the easiest way to dump the BIOS from this card and upload it here? I prefer a method that can be done on a PC. I have a very old BIOS programmer but I've never used it and have zero experience with such devices... I also have no idea if it'd be compatible.
NSSI (Navrátil Software System Information) can be used to dump your video card's BIOS directly onto your PC.
Awesome! That is a fantastic utility... very easy to use once installed. Just FYI to others, the nssi060.exe program is actually a DOS based installer. Renaming the file seems to cause it to fail an integrity check, so do not rename it. When you run it it will basically dump all of the necessary files into the current folder, so I recommend moving it to its own directory before running it in DOS.
Anyway, I was able to save the v3.04 BIOS from my card to a .VBI file using this program. I have attached it to this post.
If I wanted to flash an image like this to another card or another BIOS ROM chip, how would I go about doing that? I have a feeling there aren't any methods as easy as dumping the BIOS.
Better late than never, but just wanted to thank you for this. Version 1.01 was the only one available on VGA Legacy. I just received a Stealth 3D 2000 Pro from a seller on eBay who listed it as faulty as it was displaying a garbled image; I noticed that the card clearly didn't have the original BIOS chip. Got the card and dumped the BIOS to check... sure enough, the card had a Trio64 BIOS! After flashing the right one, it's now working perfectly.
Anyhow, to answer your question, you can flash the ROM using a USB programmer (Such as the TL866-II). I use a programmer and it's incredibly easy to use.
Off the back of all of this, I did some digging and thankfully was able to find your newer BIOS which I flashed to the card... the BIOS works great, but I noticed that the 3.04 BIOS seems to make the card only run at 57MHz instead of the 72MHz of the 1.01 BIOS. I have modified the 3.04 BIOS to use the original 72MHz speed from 1.01 by changing the bytes at offset 0x29B and fixed the checksum. I've run a Final Reality test and can confirm that the card now performs the same as it did previously, so this has done the trick. As the card has 30ns RAM (well mine does anyway), I expect that at least 80MHz should be achievable, possibly more, depending on the quality of the chip on my board.
Anyway, please find attached a pack of BIOSes which includes the original 1.01 BIOS (72MHz), the original 3.04 BIOS that you kindly provided (57MHz), and the 3.04 BIOS that I modified to run at 72MHz.