so the pc shows nothing until the windows logo appears?

Could also be a Mac version. Once Windows has loaded the driver, the BIOS is no longer important and the card will work. If the BIOS would be corrupt, the PC should beep because of the non-presence of a video card.

Riva 128 on Mac ? never heard about.

mrau wrote:

so the pc shows nothing until the windows logo appears?

Exactly. I thought the card was dead and never tested it thoroughly. By accident I left it in a slot, forgot it was faulty, turned on the PC and left the room.. only to be greeted by the windows desktop thereafter. Driver install went fine and it worked as usual. No picture on bootup/Dos.

@Sammler - THANKS. You might be on to something...is there some more info on a Mac version? The card even looks slighly different when compared to the others.

if it is a mac vrsion then flashing might help i believe; i just have no clue whether this is really straightforward;

Quite similar issue here, so I'm reviving this thread.
Got a Diamond Viper V330 PCI that doesn't get detected at POST, tried on two different motherboards:
-Gigabyte with NF2 chipset, POST hangs;
-Soyo with MVP3 chipset, gives "no video card" beeps then goes further.

On the NF2 chipset it works great in WinXP as long as there is another video card present, but it is only detected in Device Manager. 3DMark 2k1 only shows the other card (it was a Virge/DX), and so does GPU-z, which means I'm unable to use it to dump the video BIOS.
I haven't booted Windows on the MVP3 board, but since it doesn't hang on boot with the Viper I guess it might behave exactly as amadeus777999 described in his initial post.

The chip is flash-able, there are some BIOSes on the net, what software do you recommend me to try?

I haven't resolved the issue yet because the link(on a japanese site) is dead.
Do you have a tool for which you could provide a link or an attachment "quicknick"?

I sold a PCI V330 Viper three months ago. It got correctly detected and outputted a signal from boot on. Your card must be a mac version or has some other BIOS diff.

PCI video cards for Mac G3 machines usually come with two monitor connectors: industry standard D-Sub (DB15HD) and Apple DB15. Matrox Millennium I and II also have both no matter whether PC or Mac flashed.

amadeus777999 wrote:

I haven't resolved the issue yet because the link(on a japanese site) is dead.
Do you have a tool for which you could provide a link or an attachment "quicknick"?

Here's what I could find, cannot remember the exact websites now but I guess you can search by filename. There was some discussion around the 1.82 BIOS version, something about this version being for 8MB-only or applying to both 4MB and 8MB cards. My retro gear is all tucked away for the holidays to give my home the resemblance of normality 😁, so I'll be able to play with these files only at the beginning of 2019...
In any case, I am quite interested in dumping the current BIOS first, that's why I asked about what software can be used for that (since GPU-z doesn't "see" the card). Maybe Uniflash? I think I'll give it a go.

quicknick wrote:

Here's what I could find, cannot remember the exact websites now but I guess you can search by filename. There was some discussi […]
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amadeus777999 wrote:

I haven't resolved the issue yet because the link(on a japanese site) is dead.
Do you have a tool for which you could provide a link or an attachment "quicknick"?

Here's what I could find, cannot remember the exact websites now but I guess you can search by filename. There was some discussion around the 1.82 BIOS version, something about this version being for 8MB-only or applying to both 4MB and 8MB cards. My retro gear is all tucked away for the holidays to give my home the resemblance of normality 😁, so I'll be able to play with these files only at the beginning of 2019...
In any case, I am quite interested in dumping the current BIOS first, that's why I asked about what software can be used for that (since GPU-z doesn't "see" the card). Maybe Uniflash? I think I'll give it a go.

flash182b.zip

riva128.zip

Thanks a lot! If it's possible I will backup the BIOS on this Riva128 before overwriting it.

I guess I can't stay away from my retro stuff for more than a few days. Played again with the card, tried to dump the current BIOS but VPRFLASH only saves a "stub" of about 2KB in size, while Uniflash goes to the other extreme and tries to fill the entire floppy when dumping (I had around 470K free on the disk, got a "disk full" message, obviously the BIOS is only 32KB).

Anyway, took my chance and flashed the 1.82 version, and... here it is:

Looks like indeed this version is for the 8MB card, but it correctly detects 4MB on mine and seems to work perfectly. However, I will have to really test the card on a Win98 computer, because there's no Direct3D driver available for XP. If there'll be any problems I'll flash it again with BIOS 1.50 that I just found:

Sorry to revive an old thread but I figured it's better to keep things together. I have a V330 8MB running the 1.81 BIOS and would be happy to back it up and archive it here if anyone can tell me how 😀

NSSI for DOS can save video bios.
https://www.navsoft.cz/products.htm

But nssi does not work properly in some cases..

http://www.rainbow-software.org/uniflash.txt
Uniflash can also do.

And Debug which shipped with 9x and DOS.

If anybody else is searching for those Viper V330 Bios files - here is where I found them now:

ftp://ftp.dyu.edu.tw/pub/Hardware/vendor/Diam … per/viper_v330/

Hello,

sorry to hijack this thread, however perhaps you can help me resurrecting a PCI RIVA 128 by STB I found at a fleamarket. The board is in good general order and looks exactly like this [1], except that is the PCI version. The problem is this board was stripped of its BIOS in DIP-28 package and in eevry photos of this board on the Internet, the EEPROM is covered with a label. Looking at the bios images, it must be 32kB/256kb EPROM. The ELSA version of this board has a PLCC-32 AT29C257 EPROM. Would anyone with the STB version be able to provide a lecture of the code over his DIP-28 EEPROM and confirm which chip they used ?

Thanks,
Attilio

[1] http://www.vgamuseum.info/media/k2/items/cach … e748eae3_XL.jpg

I have a still working card, but I wanted to dump the vBIOS myself as I have a model with all the ports at the back and I wanted to have it in case there's special code for them. I tried UniFlash first, and that gave me 128KB files. Then I tried NSSI and it gave me 32KB files. I don't know which to trust if any, so can anyone tell me which are valid if any?

Also I dumped this from a Phenom II x4 955 based system with an ASUS M4A79XTD EVO. If the platform being too new is an issue, I can go down to a 478 P4, but I am supremely lazy. I have no older system to test, and this is currently in my NAS because I literally do not have any better hardware to use for in it.

fiandro wrote on 2022-12-12, 15:55:

Hello, […]
Show full quote

Hello,

sorry to hijack this thread, however perhaps you can help me resurrecting a PCI RIVA 128 by STB I found at a fleamarket. The board is in good general order and looks exactly like this [1], except that is the PCI version. The problem is this board was stripped of its BIOS in DIP-28 package and in eevry photos of this board on the Internet, the EEPROM is covered with a label. Looking at the bios images, it must be 32kB/256kb EPROM. The ELSA version of this board has a PLCC-32 AT29C257 EPROM. Would anyone with the STB version be able to provide a lecture of the code over his DIP-28 EEPROM and confirm which chip they used ?

Thanks,
Attilio

[1] http://www.vgamuseum.info/media/k2/items/cach … e748eae3_XL.jpg

STB seem to use eproms on these cards you can't reprogram the chips
they are AT27LV256A 15PC