Harald Nesland

Okay, long title but it’s for teh google. For some time now I’ve been trying to get this PC-card to work on my Mac Pro. It won’t out of the box, but with some adjustments to the cards BIOS/ROM you can get it working.

The first thing you need to do is get your current bios from the card. This can be achieved by using GPU-Z on Windows, or ATIFLASH.EXE from DOS (FreeDOS, Ultimate Boot CD). With GPU-Z you just click the chip-icon and it saves the RV770.BIN file. NOTE: The size has to be 128K. If you’re getting a 64K file, this means the dump didn’t finish or the utility didn’t understand to dump the whole ROM.

Now you’ll need to modify this bios by adding the required EFI-firmware. For this you need an actual Mac 4870-romfile. Like this one.

Then we need to extract the EFI-parts of this romfile. This can be done with the dd-util that is distributed with every Mac, Linux and BSD desktop :)

dd if=mac4870.rom of=efi.part bs=1 skip=63488 count=49152

Then we figure out the size of the blocks.

blocknum=$(printf %d "'`dd if=RV770.BIN bs=1 skip=2 count=1 2>/dev/null`")
size=$(($blocknum * 512))

The $size variable will then be used in the next dd.

dd if=efi.part of=RV770.BIN bs=$size seek=1 conv=notrunc

Now the EFI-parts has been added. We then need to adjust the final rom before use with a Python script written by “pipomolo42″.

python fixrom.py RV770.BIN RV770.BIN

First parameter is the in-file, the second is the out-file.

Now the RV770.BIN is ready to be flashed to your card. This can be either done from DOS with ATIFLASH.EXE (atiflash.exe -p -fs -fp 0 RV770.BIN) or with some Apple-tools if you want to do this from OSX.

So, for OSX flashing you’ll need iMac Graphics Update 1.0.2 and Pacifist. We’ll use Pacifist to extract ATIROMFlasher.kext and ATIFacelessFlash.app.

You might want to remove all .IMG files in ATIFacelessFlash.app/Contents/Resources/ before you continue. Then you have to add your custom made RV770.BIN to this directory. When done, execute the following commands from a terminal.

# This will load the interface for flashing ati-cards.
sudo kextload ATIROMFlasher.kext/

# This will do the actual flasshing
sudo open ATIFacelessFlash.app/

# And this will unload the flashing extension.
sudo kextunload ATIROMFlasher.kext/

You’ll notice an icon appearing in the Dock while flashing, and it silently disappears when done. When it disappears, reboot your Mac and the card should work.

Thanks to all contributors of the MacRumors forum and to Boeglin.