VOGONS


First post, by Arctic

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A long time ago i bought a villlage tronic mp850, but later i found out that it has been flashed to PC. I dont have the original bios or mac flash tools but i do have a mac. The card works perfectly well in a PC

is there a way to flash it back to its original state? Help

Reply 1 of 11, by meljor

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Can't you simply flash it with the mac bios on a pc in dos? It will not work in the pc after flashing (and a restart I guess) but it will have the right bios for a mac at that point, right?

I would try that..

And if you have the one with the socketed bios I would simply order a new bios chip and flash that with a programmer, and keep the original in case something doesn't work right.

asus tx97-e, 233mmx, voodoo1, s3 virge ,sb16
asus p5a, k6-3+ @ 550mhz, voodoo2 12mb sli, gf2 gts, awe32
asus p3b-f, p3-700, voodoo3 3500TV agp, awe64
asus tusl2-c, p3-S 1,4ghz, voodoo5 5500, live!
asus a7n8x DL, barton cpu, 6800ultra, Voodoo3 pci, audigy1

Reply 2 of 11, by meljor

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And from the web:

The Voodoo3 drivers for Macintosh include a flash utility that says it can replace the PC BIOS boot ROM of a Voodoo3 2000 PCI or 3000 PCI with a Macintosh OpenFirmware version.

So that should be an easy way to get at least a normal voodoo3 working.

asus tx97-e, 233mmx, voodoo1, s3 virge ,sb16
asus p5a, k6-3+ @ 550mhz, voodoo2 12mb sli, gf2 gts, awe32
asus p3b-f, p3-700, voodoo3 3500TV agp, awe64
asus tusl2-c, p3-S 1,4ghz, voodoo5 5500, live!
asus a7n8x DL, barton cpu, 6800ultra, Voodoo3 pci, audigy1

Reply 3 of 11, by havli

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Perhaps it might not be so easy to find the original BIOS, too. I can't find MP850 BIOS in my collection of 3dfx related stuff.
I have very similar card however, which I believe is just a rebrand of Villagetronic http://hw-museum.cz/vga/34/ixmicro-ix3d-game-rocket Last time I tried it worked in MAC... but that was in 2011 and it is in storage since then.

BIOS on my card is soldered, so it can't be easily downloaded by flash programmer. Maybe if there is some kind of BIOS dump utility that could read it in regular PC (because I don't have working MAC anymore), then I could try to get it.

HW museum.cz - my collection of PC hardware

Reply 4 of 11, by Arctic

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I will try to contact Village Tronic. Maybe they still have the files?

@havli
If we can find a BIOS dump utility, I would love to try the BIOS of your card.
Could you send it to me before that? 😎

Reply 5 of 11, by dr.zeissler

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A bit off-topic.
Why did VT offer a MacVersion of the Voodoo3/Banshee that does not work with the standard mac 3dfx drivers?
They did release an opengl beta/alpha which seem to work, but is VERY!!!! slow. I never understood that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170112132152/ht … Graphics/MP960/

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/4188/villag … c-opengl-driver
https://web.archive.org/web/20050306073407/ht … su_cl_down.html
https://web.archive.org/web/19991116160235/ht … P850_MMpro.html

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 6 of 11, by havli

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Arctic wrote:

@havli
If we can find a BIOS dump utility, I would love to try the BIOS of your card.
Could you send it to me before that? 😎

Sure, I will send it to you.... if I manage to read it somehow from the card.
The good news is I found the card in the storage, now I will search for some bios utilities. 😀

HW museum.cz - my collection of PC hardware

Reply 7 of 11, by Arctic

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thank you! 😀

VillageTronic seems to still have an active FTP server:

ftp://ftp.villagetronic.com

But you need an account apparently 😵

I found a flasher for a MAC BIOS for voodoo 3 cards in a driver bundle on falconfly:
https://3dfxarchive.com/voodoo3.htm

https://3dfxarchive.com/downloads/voodoo3driv … s_beta13_c3.sit

Reply 8 of 11, by havli

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This tool probably only works on MAC.
On the other hand I found some 3dfx BIOS-dump application. And also it seems Uniflash might be able to get BIOS from Banshee card. The catch is I must use Villagetronic as a secondary GPU (because it wouldn't boot as primary in PC) and I'm not sure if it is possible to read BIOS from it. Anyway i'll give it a try in the next week.

HW museum.cz - my collection of PC hardware

Reply 9 of 11, by havli

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Sorry for the delay, I didn't have a chance to get to this until today.

The good news is I managed to download the MAC BIOS from my Banshee using the Uniflash tool. 😀
http://hw-museum.cz/data/vogons/MP850.BIN

It is definitely different from regular PC Banshee BIOS, so it might work.

HW museum.cz - my collection of PC hardware