Vehemently Vitriolic

Or a girl. Or possibly a hermaphrodite. Its really hard to tell on these things, though I am leaning more towards female now that I think about it. The VGA, DVI and ethernet all appear to be “innie” connections. For arguments sake, we’ll say my G4 Powermac is a girl then. Happy? Great.

A friend of mine hooked me up with an old Powermac G4450MHz Sawtooth from a “we’re closing some parts of the company out but not everything so don’t worry you’re cool. For NOW!”.

Everyone scoffed. After all, 450MHz is not something blazingly fast by today’s standards to be sure (and yes, I know the old PPC processors’ do not equate 1:1 with an x86 processor) but still! A Mac! I have always loved the Mac platform, but could never afford anything better than an old Umax G3 clone (also inherited in a “going out of business” sale) years ago that sucked badly. I recently picked up a Powerbook Wallstreet for $75 from the best used computer parts guy in the lower mainland. But its exceedingly slow and Panther is really the only OS that will realistically work on it. So, I jumped at a 450MHz. I also had a copy of Tiger sitting around, so I immediately plowed it over and installed fresh.

Things went along fine, but the first time I restarted after installing, I found the ATI Rage128 Pro that came in the AGP slot seemed……backwards. It had both a VGA port and a DVI port. I have a wicked awesome 22″ LCD, so I naturally hooked up the DVI. Turns out, for whatever reason, the DVI port goes to a maximum of 1024×768. The VGA port would get up to the required 1680×1050 so I didn’t have seizures watching it, but….VGA? I mean…..really?

I was sorta pissed at that, but so be it. This wasn’t going to be my primary machine, so big deal. Then I read that the Quartz engine built-in to OS X would NOT function with the Rage! This situation needed to be rectified. The UI was just not as…pretty as I recalled, and Quartz was a big part of that.

I started doing some research and found I could replace the Rage card with something else. And thats when I remembered why I didn’t have Macs. A used nVidia-based GeForce 4 will run about $30. A used GeForce 4 Mac edition will run you about $130. Holy suck it Trebek!

Mercifully, Mac people far smarter than I were at hand. The Mac Elite had a great idea: Essentially, nearly every card ever made with a “Mac Edition” sticker (and associated 2000% markup) had a PC-doppelganger whos only difference was the ROM loaded. So, why not flash the sucker with the working Mac ROM file?

Off I went to Kevins again and got a card. A Radeon 9000 64MB OEM card (complete with NCIX sticker still on the back) for $15.

So I had the card and the ROM file location from here and the utility to flash with from here. Problem is, I don’t have a Windows box, and had no desire to build one to flash a card to put into a Mac. So, for many of the same reasons I posted the P5GC-MX article (becuase I’ll forget) heres how I did it using an existing Ubuntu box:

1. Create a temporary dir to hold everything

mkdir ~/temp_boot
cd ~/temp_boot

2. I used FreeDOS rather than sticking XP or Win98 on a machine. FDOS has made a bootable image that works perfectly, so grab that


wget http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz
gunzip FDOEM.144.gz


3. Grab the flashing utility


wget http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1123g/atiflash360.zip
unzip atiflash360.zip


4. And the proper ROM file


wget http://campahunta.free.fr/Downloads/ROMs/ati_oem_9000pro_131_agp_full.zip
unzip ati_oem_9000pro_131_agp_full.zip


5. Create a temporary place to mount things


mkdir /tmp/floppy


6. You’ll need vfat and loop in order to do this, so load those up into the kernel


sudo modprobe vfat
sudo modprobe loop


7. Mount the FDOS image


sudo mount -t vfat -o loop FDOEM.144 /tmp/floppy


8. And copy the ROM and utility over


sudo cp ati_oem_9000pro_131_agp_full.rom /tmp/floppy/ati_mac.rom
sudo cp atiflash.* /tmp/floppy/


9. Unmount it


sudo umount /tmp/floppy


10. Create the ISO image


mkisofs -o boot.iso -b FDOEM.144 FDOEM.144


11. And burn it (I used a CD-RW as I don’t imagine having to do this many times)


cdrecord -v boot.iso


Now that everything was ready to go, I replaced the AGP card in the Ubuntu box with the Radeon and put in a PCI video card to watch things going on. I don’t know if this step is strictly necessary, but it seems like it would be. The card would have to load its internal ROM before posting, so I can’t imagine you could just go changing it while its loaded.

Once both video cards are in, I attached a monitor to the AGP card and booted into the BIOS. I set the primary video to PCI, saved, and restarted and stuck the monitor on the PCI to watch.

After that, its a simple matter of flashing using the instructions here.  Which, to paraphrase, is:
atiflash -p 0 ati_mac.rom -f where 0 is the card number.

Everything went well. I took out the card, put it in the G4 and voila! The DVI port worked right away, resolution was set to 1680×1050 and I started the Quartz engine going and it just looked….gorgeous.

Which at that point made me remember why I loved the Mac.