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S3 Savage4 Flash Utility?

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First post, by SaxxonPike

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Greetings!

The card I'm currently using is a Manli Savage4 16MB AGP. The flash chip is a Holtek HT27C512-70. I'm experiencing some issues with character ROM corruption in some text modes, but all graphics modes (up to and including 800x600) seem to work just fine, and I suspect there might be a problem with the ROM.

Does a utility exist for flashing the BIOS on a Savage4 card?

Thanks~

Edit: I did read this post:
BIOS For S3 Savage4 Pro?
However, it only showed a place to download the BIOS, not anywhere to actually flash it.

Sound device guides:
Sound Blaster
Aztech
OPL3-SA

Reply 1 of 3, by sd_entertainmnt

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Outside of purchasing an eprom programmer like the tl866 you may be able to use a program like uniflash or flashrom.

Reply 2 of 3, by SaxxonPike

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Thanks for the suggestion!

It turned out that the problem was not ROM. It was deterministic corruption, but we noticed it was different based on the drivers we loaded. Turns out when I upgraded to the Savage4, the new ROM was 48kb in size, larger than the last card. I had to move the start range of UMBs from CA00 to CC00. What we were seeing was the drivers overwriting character data at the end of the ROM.

Sound device guides:
Sound Blaster
Aztech
OPL3-SA

Reply 3 of 3, by wbc

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AFAIK S3 cards barely utilise Flash ROM as video BIOS storage, almost all known cards use 27Cxxx series chips (same for your card) which are either one-time programmable or require UV erasing pefore flashing (there are some chips from Winbond and probably SST from 27 series that can be electrically erased but they are quite uncommon and still require external programmer to flash)

--wbcbz7

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