Main > Monitor/Video Forum
Idea: customized videocard BIOS
elvis:
Here in Australia we too are free from stupid DRM ("Digital Restrictions Management" as RMS calls them) and DMCA style laws (for the short term, at least.... here's hoping out politicians aren't stupid enough to be seduced by wealthy American corporations).
Anyhoo... enough about that political agenda...
I'm all for a project where making 15/25KHz outbut BIOS hacks available to the community can happen. I've tried myself, but to be honest my hardware and assembly knowledge is grossly lacking, but I'm willing to help anyone else who wants to start such things in any way that I can.
I should say, however, that I will not be a part of any project that bases their work on the ArcadeVGA. Not for any legal reasons, but for moral ones. Andy has done a fantastic job with his products, and if anyone wants to compete with him (open source or not) they need to be fair and start from scratch. If that means the project will take 10 times as long, then so be it. Theft is theft, no matter how you play it, and I won't be a part of that.
RayB:
We could just petition the Big 2 and ask them to add such video modes to their next driver release. (The big 2 being ATI and NVidia)
b3atmania:
--- Quote from: MonitorGuru on March 07, 2005, 10:36:33 am --- >:( :police: Well first, any attempt to dump the ArcadeVGA BIOS would involve copyright infringement and therefore is ILLEGAL :police: >:(
--- End quote ---
For someone who owns an ArcadeVGA card it would not be illegal to dump the BIOS. It would not be illegal to disassemble and study its inner workings either.
--- Quote ---Second, why would someone who has taken the time to find a series of card that would work, edit the bios, then package and sell the product, suddenly want to GIVE IT AWAY to competition (free source) to kill their business model? ???
--- End quote ---
It depends on your view. You could also say that if the source to the ArcadeVGA BIOS was available the community will extend its capabilities (to include support for 25kHz modes for example) without Ultimarc incurring development costs. The added value community extensions provide could well mean extra sales for Ultimarc. It works both ways.
--- Quote ---Also, I think, while convient, the ArcadeVGA is overrated. If only we could control the video card's output during POST and boot, then (almost) any card can be used to drive a VGA monitor once loaded by doing it all in software, instead of firmware. However it's the post/boot that is the major problem. Solve that and you don't have to do the entire solution, making it a much easier process.
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I think only the situation during POST is problematic. At boot you could indeed do everything in software. It would be fairly trivial to create a bootloader that does some VGA register tweaking. This would allow DOS to boot in 15kHz. In fact, AdvanceMAME has a utility for this, although that starts from AUTOEXEC.BAT and not from the bootstrap loader.
AceTKK:
Yes! I'd been hoping somebody would come along with enough low-lvl programming know-how to take on this project. I had considered petitioning ATi to add support for arcade monitor frequencies to their unified driver, but I doubt they would consider the market valuable enough to bother doing it. I'd be happy to help out any way I can.
On the issue of Andy & Ultimarc; I'd like to avoid hurting his profits as he's been an awesome pioneer and a contributing member of this community. On the other hand, the whole spirit of this forum is reflected in the "do it yourself" attitude. If we can hack together a working alternative to a commercial product then I'm all for it. There will always be a market for those who aren't technically inclined or interested in setting up / troubleshooting a home-brew solution, and the ArcadeVGA will remain attractive option to that market.
I'm going to do a little research into Radeon BIOS flashing utilities, I know I've come across one or two when experimenting with third-party BIOSes on my old Radeon card. Let's keep this thread active and hopefully we can find a solution.
-Ace-
AndyWarne:
I am rather disappointed in some of the replies on this thread. I am sure the original poster had good intentions but some people seem to have taken this as a call to reverse-engineer and copy the ArcadeVGA card.
The card hardware is different. The PLL clock on VGA cards is designed to deal with resolutions up to 1280 and beyond, not down to 240 at 15Khz. The clock generation does not work properly at the low frequencies necessary as anyone who has tried to use Powerstrip to create a low resolution at 15Khz will have found out.
The BIOS is a complete re-write and this represents 6 months of intensive work during which time I nearly gave up many times. It is not just a matter of changing some tables, there is a completely new section of code for example which calculates the pixel clock based on a fixed 15Khz scan rate and enables interlacing if required.
The other point is that the BIOS does not stay static. For example ATI recently replaced the R9200 with R9250. Although this is pin-compatible with the 9200 the BIOS requirements are different, which required me to lock myself in my workshop for 2 weeks. Also using different RAM chips on the board needs a BIOS change.
In order to start this project I had to put a project plan to ATI and sign non-disclosure agreements etc. I do know that they are litigous in this area as some time ago they threatened legal action against someone in Canada who posted their flash utility on a website.
I do agree with the poster above that this is meant to be a DIY forum so I can't blame anyone for asking the questions, but please remember that, as I think anyone of the small band of people such as myself, Randy, Oscar and others would agree, none of us are going to get rich selling to the MAME community! We are all selling specialised low-volume products as prices more suited to a high-turnover commodity. Also the nature of the products require a great deal of support, which hopefully we all give to the best of our abilities.
Preventing us from even covering financial investment would not do any good at all to anyone.
I would suggest an alternative to the ArcadeVGA card is already there: Advanced MAME. This is the DIY solution.
Andy