Anyone with a 16mb single head out there? I need help badly!

[Jadawin]

Hi!

There is a thread called "no bootscreen, no dos, no dosbox" somewhere in this board. And as I said there, I got the bios and the mypins.txt from a friend today. I flashed my card with his data and... my g400 was resurrected! A bootscreen! A DOS screen! And Windo..oopps... black icons? Black spots? Every 2 seconds the PC freezes for half a sec? argh...

I am 100% sure what is causing this... my single head 16 MB is now thinking it is a 32 MB dualhead... because the bios and pins came from such a g400. Well, now I know for sure that my card is still alive but has some...ermm... mental problems.

Is there anybody out there using a 16 mb single head willing to send me his mypins.txt? Using this I can convince my insane G400 that there are only 16 mb and only one head.

Btw, I can use my g400 with standard vga drivers without freezes and black spots or icons. This is how I am working right now.

If you are willing to help, get the bios-update package from the matrox site, unpack it and boot into plain dos. then cd into the matrox/util dir and enter:

progbios -d >mypins.txt

This will dump some data into a file called mypins.txt. And I really would appreciate someone being so kind to send this file to jad@gmx.net

Oh, I almost forgot: I compared my own old pins.txt to that of my friends g400. Mine was corrupted! And this was causing all that problems discribed in the thread mentioned above. I guess it would be best for everybody to save his g400-PINS as long as everything works fine!

Jadawin

[Jorden]

I don't think that the PINS give info on the G400 being a 16 or 32 Mb card, do they??

Maybe Greg (GBM) can shine some light on this??

Jorden.

[Jadawin]

They do! I used mxinfo to read the pins (dumping them to pins.txt did not work) of my backuped dead bios and compared them to the pins of that 32 MB dualhead g400. There were some obvious (serial etc.) differences and some unknown differences. I edited the pins-file entering my g400-serial and several other things I was sure of and most of all, I changed the last 2 lines which contain "factory options". After flashing the bios again using this edited pins.txt my matrox is working 100% again! It is now recognized as a single head 16 MB. Only the ramdac is shown as internal instead of 250 mhz like it was before. But everything works fine, even quake 3

I think that the pins are as important as the bios itself, because they seem to tell the drivers how to communicate with the bios.

I am so happy my g400 is back!

Jadawin

[Jadawin]

... and when flashing the bios, the pins of the existing old bios will be preserved and written into the new bios during the programming progress. So this information should stay inside the flashrom forever. But if the pins die like mine did, the bios is dead and no flashing could bring it back to live... except flashing with working pins!