New Matrox G550 BIOS? (Well... newer!) \ VOGONS

New Matrox G550 BIOS? (Well... newer!)

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First post, by RichB93

Posted on 2018-04-10, 20:06

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Hi all,

Long time no see! I haven't been around on this forum for quite some time, so hello again! Anyhow, I have recently been looking into Matrox G550 graphics cards, and to my amazement, Matrox still support these things! (They even slapped a PCI-PCIe bridge on one and still flog it to this day!) This made me think... If the card itself is essentially unchanged, except that it has a PCIe bridge on the card, surely the BIOS must be identical when compared to the older hardware, right?

I downloaded the latest BIOS for the PCIe version of this card, and yes, the BIOS looks exactly the same. The initial 32k is the same as the PCI BIOS, with the remaining 96k being new (and presumably either for the bridge chip, or perhaps, if one were to be adventurous and solder a larger flash chip to their card, would provide UEFI support to the ageing card, as this is apparently what the latest BIOS does!)

The last available BIOS for the card was V1.5 b15 (Dated 2006), and the BIOS I have extracted from the new BIOS image is V1.7 b17 (Dated 2014).

I'll let you know how my testing goes...

Reply 1 of 10, by lazibayer

Posted on 2018-04-10, 20:22

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So... What's your plan? Solder a bigger flash chip and try the PCIe firmware?
Just to be accurate, the G550 is native to AGP and the PCI version has an AGP-PCI bridge chip onboard and the PCIe version has an AGP-PCIe bridge chip onboard.

Reply 2 of 10, by RichB93

Posted on 2018-04-10, 20:47

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I've extracted the 32k BIOS from the new BIN and I'll give that a go 😀

Ahh, I wasn't aware of that! Explains why there is only one BIOS for all AGP/PCI cards.

Reply 3 of 10, by lazibayer

Posted on 2018-04-10, 20:58

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When you said the first 32KB is the same as the one on the PCI variant I thought it's literally, bit-by-bit, the same. I guess I was wrong! 😁

Reply 4 of 10, by RichB93

Posted on 2018-04-11, 08:39

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Bad wording on my behalf :p I doubt the new BIOS will make much difference to be honest... unless it has new timings for new RAM, and it might fry it completely. We will see!

Reply 5 of 10, by lazibayer

Posted on 2018-04-11, 14:45

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RichB93 wrote:
Bad wording on my behalf :p I doubt the new BIOS will make much difference to be honest... unless it has new timings for new RAM, and it might fry it completely. We will see!

Please report back! I am curious too!
I had a G550 PCI in the past and it won't boot on my (super) socket 7 mobos. I should have thought of tinkering with the firmware.

Reply 6 of 10, by 1541

Posted on 2018-04-12, 18:49

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You could test if e.g. "Commander Keen 4" will work correctly.
This game usually suffers from screen stuttering while scrolling in the game on a G550.

💾 Windows 9x resources (drivers, tools, NUSB,...) 💾

Reply 7 of 10, by RichB93

Posted on 2018-04-13, 20:38

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Finally had a chance to start playing 😀

The good news is that the BIOS flashes without an issue. Flashed and rebooted, and 1.7 is installed and functioning well so far (at least from primitive testing!)

I'll try and do some benchmarks between this BIOS and different versions to see if there are any actual real world improvements (unlikely, but it doesn't hurt to see).

I've attached the BIOS at the bottom of this post. It is actually a little bit over 32k. No idea what the extra data is as its a 1Mbit flash chip on the card. Metadata for the flasher perhaps?

https://i.imgur.com/aHPzuTv.jpg

Attachments

Filename

964-17.txt

File size

36 KiB

Downloads

54 downloads

File comment

Matrox G550 V1.7 b17 BIOS extracted from G550 PCIe BIOS (rename to .bin).

File license

Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 8 of 10, by RichB93

Posted on 2018-04-14, 11:19

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Haven't had a chance to try DOS or 9X yet, but at least on the XP front, the BIOS hasn't made any perceptible difference... Only thing I've found so far is that even though the 5.93.009 drivers are the last ones with 3D support, they do in fact lack features from the previous 5.92.006; 3DMark 2001 complains about the card not being able to render into textures when using them!

Reply 9 of 10, by lazibayer

Posted on 2018-04-14, 19:25

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RichB93 wrote:
Haven't had a chance to try DOS or 9X yet, but at least on the XP front, the BIOS hasn't made any perceptible difference... Only thing I've found so far is that even though the 5.93.009 drivers are the last ones with 3D support, they do in fact lack features from the previous 5.92.006; 3DMark 2001 complains about the card not being able to render into textures when using them!

Ha... I did a bunch of tests with G450 drivers but I didn't try with 3dmark2001... Maybe you can test the dual head functionalities, too?

Reply 10 of 10, by RichB93

Posted on 2018-04-18, 21:28

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1541 wrote:
You could test if e.g. "Commander Keen 4" will work correctly.
This game usually suffers from screen stuttering while scrolling in the game on a G550.

I'm afraid the stuttering still exists! Can't say I'm too surprised sadly, as I doubt they focus on DOS / Legacy stuff now.

lazibayer wrote:
Ha... I did a bunch of tests with G450 drivers but I didn't try with 3dmark2001... Maybe you can test the dual head functionalities, too?

I'll definitely some stuff with it and post my results 😀

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