FX5200 PCI BIOS & compatibility with detonator 45.23 driver \ VOGONS

FX5200 PCI BIOS & compatibility with detonator 45.23 driver

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First post, by xpladv570

Posted on 2022-08-06, 00:41

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I am in a posession of a couple of FX5200 PCI cards (both 128bit, one of which has severely downclocked memory) that for some mysterious reason do not work with older drivers, like the 45.23. They reliably work with driver 6x.xx and above. Older drivers do detect the cards as FX5200, but upon reboot in win98 I am greeted with a black screen.

Meanwhile, my FX 5500 PCI seems to be working fine after altering the NVAML.inf file. However that card is one of these chinese ebay specials that I am not too fond of using. I wondered what could be the reason for this incompatibility. After dumping the BIOS of both of my FX5200 I noticed that the BIOS version (04.34.20.87.00) is higher than other FX5200 AGP BIOS that I encounter. Also, the BIOS date for each of these cards is 2006 and 2007 respectively.

Could the BIOS of these cards be the reason, why they refuse to work with the older drivers? These cards are pretty useless to me if they cant run 45.23 or 42.45. Too many bugs with the newer versions (which I did encounter). Is there a kind soul that can dump their FX5200 128bit 128/256MB PCI BIOS? Or perhaps the solution lies elsewhere?

Reply 1 of 9, by Repo Man11

Posted on 2022-08-07, 01:05

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I have one of these, and if you can recommend a program, I could get a copy of the BIOS.

https://www.newegg.com/pny-geforce-fx-5200-vc … N82E16814133007

"I'd rather be rich than stupid" - Jack Handey

Reply 2 of 9, by xpladv570

Posted on 2022-08-07, 16:50

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Much appreciated.

Re: Issue with a ti4600 Video Board. Is it fried?

In this post linked above someone kindly attached nvflash (nvidia firmware utility) that works. It is a DOS program, so it should be either ran from a DOS floppy or in DOS command prompt.

Reply 3 of 9, by Repo Man11

Posted on 2022-08-07, 21:47

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I installed the card in my Soyo 5EMA+ and double checked and it is a 256 megabyte/128 bit card, and it does work fine with Windows 98 SE and the 45.23 driver. Nvflash isn't cooperating; running it from a DOS boot disk it always gives this same error: "Exiting due to signal SIGILL
Invalid Opcode at eip=0000c2a2"

I've tried Nvflash 446, 513, and 595 but the error has happened with all three versions.

"I'd rather be rich than stupid" - Jack Handey

Reply 4 of 9, by xpladv570

Posted on 2022-08-07, 22:17

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I encountered this error too on a K6-2 machine. Seems like nvflash relies on an instruction that isn't present on these processors. I couldn't find any information about it either.

Reply 5 of 9, by Repo Man11

Posted on 2022-08-07, 22:38

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xpladv570 wrote on 2022-08-07, 22:17:

I encountered this error too on a K6-2 machine. Seems like nvflash relies on an instruction that isn't present on these processors. I couldn't find any information about it either.

I moved the card to a Pentium 4 machine, and Nvflash worked perfectly in that one. The BIOS version displayed during bootup is "PNY Verto GeForce FX5200PCI 4.34.20.87T22N." I saved it as "Backup.rom" but I had to change the extension to .exe to be allowed to upload it, so change it back before trying to flash it.

Attachments

Filename

backup.exe

File size

62 KiB

Downloads

48 downloads

File license

CC-BY-4.0

"I'd rather be rich than stupid" - Jack Handey

Reply 6 of 9, by Repo Man11

Posted on 2022-08-07, 22:46

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If anyone knows why "Backup.rom" is not allowed, but "Backup.exe" is, please explain it to me.

"I'd rather be rich than stupid" - Jack Handey

Reply 7 of 9, by swaaye

Posted on 2022-08-08, 05:34

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Just put the ROM inside an archive of some sort. Zip it up eh.

The site surely has a whitelist of popular web related file types. A rom file isn't really one of those. Self extracting archives on the other hand are common.

Reply 8 of 9, by xpladv570

Posted on 2022-08-08, 16:40

xpladv570 Offline

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Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-08-07, 22:38:

xpladv570 wrote on 2022-08-07, 22:17:

I encountered this error too on a K6-2 machine. Seems like nvflash relies on an instruction that isn't present on these processors. I couldn't find any information about it either.

I moved the card to a Pentium 4 machine, and Nvflash worked perfectly in that one. The BIOS version displayed during bootup is "PNY Verto GeForce FX5200PCI 4.34.20.87T22N." I saved it as "Backup.rom" but I had to change the extension to .exe to be allowed to upload it, so change it back before trying to flash it.

Thank you very much for your effort, i hope that this will solve the problem. I sure hope thats the reason why the driver doesnt work - unless the FX5200 had different revisions in the later years.

Reply 9 of 9, by Geri

Posted on 2022-08-21, 19:37

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on win xp, 42.86 is the only driver that works perfectly for me with the FX5200 PCI. newer drivers crash, and/or the performance is 80% lower than it should be.
under win 9x, more drivers around this era working correctly.

TitaniumGL the OpenGL to D3D wrapper:
http://users.atw.hu/titaniumgl/index.html

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