Maybe try it with this one?

https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2019 … ivers-2637.html

oh, i didn't realize there was a win9x omega series. my research suggests the drivers you linked to were the last ati win9x omega drivers released which only support up to the radeon 9250.

i tried installing rivatuner which i kind of remember could perform the softmod, but none of the win9x drivers appear to be supported.

if this is even possible i think it's going to come down to manually editing sys files...still trying to find instructions on old websites.

I saw that too, but from the screenshot:

Edit: Tried installing them and they do show that softmod option.

Why not flash the card with a VBIOS that unlocks the pipes?

DonCatoli wrote on 2022-12-24, 00:30:

Why not flash the card with a VBIOS that unlocks the pipes?

I have a 9800 SE that I've unlocked with the Omega drivers - I've looked around and haven't been able to find a BIOS or flashing tool to do that. If you know of a site that still has such available, please link to it.

Oh man, back in the day I was the guy to talk to about this but can’t remember much of it now.

I remember I used rabit? (radeon bios editor) and atiflash? All the time with great success from within windows xp?

I think the trick is finding a radeon 9800 xt or pro that has the same ram as yours and using its bios. From there you could edit the hardware ID if you wanted to match other cards and also could edit the clock. Once happy with the config, match the bios ram timing of your old card and save the file. Then flash it.

Post a pic on f your card front and back please.

A gpu and ram close up might also help

I believe 9800 series used two different gpu revisions

i think this is the card. i'll have to read the bios identifier to be sure, but i remember it had the later r360 chip revision and the absolute slowest memory clock of any 9800 se released.

https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/97/powerc … 28-hynix-030702

softmod was so easy and the card was a poor overclocker that i never bothered looking further into flashing anything else. although i do have an x1050 that i might be motivated to mod into a 9600 pro.

i'll check out the omega drivers. current driver revision is 4.15.1.9165 so we'll see how far behind the omega drivers are.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-12-24, 01:01:

DonCatoli wrote on 2022-12-24, 00:30:

Why not flash the card with a VBIOS that unlocks the pipes?

I have a 9800 SE that I've unlocked with the Omega drivers - I've looked around and haven't been able to find a BIOS or flashing tool to do that. If you know of a site that still has such available, please link to it.

You cannot flash it to unlock the pipes without modifying resistors on gpu package. There is group of 4 resistors that control pipe quads and whether the card is firegl or Radeon. Softmd is most convenient. Flash works only for clocks.

Source: https://t.ly/zUXu

There was a method to dump your bios and mod it to unlock the pipes and flash back
Remember doing it myself back in the day and unlocking radeon 9500 to radeon 9700 with similar method
https://www.overclock.net/threads/guide-to-ra … modding.149501/

or you can back up your bios and flash some unlocked bios with same speed/chip model
https://web.archive.org/web/20040722175735/ht … oftmod/bios.php

Bios is moddable with X800/x850 and also FireGL X3. Not sure about R3xx cards.

EDIT: I checked few BIOSes with HEX editor. Looks similar to X800/850 but I can't find common denominator for pipe quad unmasking.

well damn, i'd like to try out these win9x omega drivers, but every copy i've run across online, including from the link above and vogonsdrivers.com, is corrupted. one of the driver cab files fails the crc32 check during installation and if you click ignore it just bombs out later on with a file not found.

stanwebber wrote on 2023-01-02, 11:05:

well damn, i'd like to try out these win9x omega drivers, but every copy i've run across online, including from the link above and vogonsdrivers.com, is corrupted. one of the driver cab files fails the crc32 check during installation and if you click ignore it just bombs out later on with a file not found.

I have a copy of rad_w9x_omega_2637 (catalyst 4.2) driver which worked fine in w98 with the unofficial update pack installed. Picture shows the score difference of the unlock.

Link here seems to have download for that driver. Maybe you need some newer verion of dx9 or .net installation.

sirotkaslo wrote on 2022-12-21, 09:05:

Maybe try it with this one?

https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2019 … ivers-2637.html

if you have a good copy of the 2637 installer you should upload it. i get this from everything i've been able to download:

stanwebber wrote on 2023-01-02, 21:10:

if you have a good copy of the 2637 installer you should upload it. i get this from everything i've been able to download:
Screenshot_2023-01-02_15-07-00.png

I checked my copy is identical to the site linked. Are you sure you don't have some hardware / software mismatch? The omega installer also includes 2 extra programs for switching resolution and overclocking if I remember correctly.

I recommend to install the autopatcher 2007 since I have always used it on my w98 installations with this "new" hardware.

I'm not sure if there is rules to linking downloads like this but link to my copy:
https://anonfiles.com/H6a2OeP9y9/rad_w9x_omeg … atalyst_4.2_exe

yeah, your upload has the identical hash. i'm not sure what's going on, but i ran the installer under win7 and there was no crc error so i copied the extracted files to win98se and the drivers installed fine. ultimately, i reverted back to the last ati released driver (4.15.1.9165) and used a rivatuner script to unlock the pipelines.

this method was pretty accessible, but the instructions were painfully difficult to locate until i got the win9x modded filename (ati2vxag.vxd) search term from the omega drivers. at that point i even found instructions for this procedure buried on vogons.org.

i installed rivatuner 2.24c and found a win9x radeon 9x00 softmod script in the patchscripts folder. i selected 9800 and although the script complained the target file wasn't a recognized version, the softmod succeeded anyway.

man, back in the day i probably knew all about this stuff and forgot it all. i wouldn't be surprised if i used (the xp ver of) this exact script at some point.

Thanks for writing your solution. I never tried the rivatuner method since omega drivers always worked. Doing the softmod manually is probably nicer since then you don't need to install all the extras of omega driver to get it working and can use any driver between catalyst 4.2 - 6.2.

question:

will force installing a radeon 9800 xt driver accomplish the same effect?

I was able to bios flash 9800pro cards to 9800se (to fix issues related to dead pipelines) in the late 2000s.
I dont know if it works the other way around.

If someone needs the bios files and flasher, send me your retroshare hidden node id (with automatic tor setup) and download it from my computer. I cant add clearnet nodes so tor nodes only.