Hacking a PC Graphics Card into my G4 Cube!

the best graphics card ever released for the macintosh g4 cube wasn't actually released for the macintosh at all in fact the only card to offer full core image and core animation support along with quartz xtreme while still being small enough and cool running enough to run within the confines of this 8 inch cube has to be hacked in order to do so hacked in terms of the firmware on the card itself and physically hacked to work with apple's not quite standard specification for the agp graphics card slot now i've never done this before but others who have say it's well worth the trouble so let's find out together just what it takes to pack 256 megs of graphical goodness into a g4 cube and see if i don't completely ruin this card in the process so stay tuned today's macintosh shenanigans are brought to you by pcb way so many retro computing projects that we've come to depend on started with prototyping via pcbway.com in no small part due to their great pricing and turnarounds as fast as 24 hours just take a look through their shared project sections where you can find absolute gems like this amazing entire apple one clone so if you have any pcb needs i hope you'll give pcbway.com a try this graphics card here is the xfx g4 6200 with 256 mags of memory released for pc in 2006. it is an 8x agp graphics card with dvi vga and s video which officially supports 2048 by 1536 at least on pc now it's known to g4 cube owners as the wang card because the model number is pvt-44a w-a-n-g and this version of the 6200 was cracked in late 2006 with a special custom rom to allow it to run at max there are two versions of the custom rom with the cube specific one that underclocks the card to keep it running quite cool in the cube with many users claiming that it actually runs cooler than the stock card in their cube now we do have to disable pins 3 and 11 on the back of the card because back when apple used adc to send power usb and video in one cable to the monitor which is actually what this monitor is running on right now it used those two pins for power so trying to run this later agp card in this cube without disabling those pins will cause this thing to not boot now i'll link some resources below in case you want to try this for your own cube because the wang 6200 cards can be had for quite cheap in fact i picked up this one for 18 on ebay so today let's flash this card with the hacked rom and then we'll run some benchmarks on the stock graphics card in our cube and then we'll compare once we've installed the 6200 well assuming i can actually get this to work now in order to flash the graphics card we need to run nv flash on a pc running windows or dos or linux and the only pc anything i have with an agp slot is this random dell 8200 motherboard so i guess we're gonna have to drag a one this thing and just build a computer out of a bunch of random parts on the desk and hopefully that'll work so i'm pretty sure this board works let's i guess find the power supply and start this thing up okay well an 850 watt power supply is probably a little bit overkill for this thing but it's probably fine and now to start it i need to actually short pins 19 and 20 i think because i don't have the front panel for this machine and i couldn't find any exact pin out for this front panel little connector here so i guess here goes nothing okay so i couldn't figure out which pins to jump on here so i had to go scrounge up the front panel connectors for the dell and that has the power button on here so now this is even more of a dragga one spaghetti mess but let's plug this in and power it on and try not to short anything so unfortunately i just could not get my pile of dull guts to boot and just when i was about to give up all hope i found this beautiful beast for 20 bucks this is an amd sempron 1.6 gigahertz with 512 megs of ram and the guy selling it said it was an old custom computer but obviously this was rescued from the doldrums of mid-2000s e-waste and it's perfect not just because it looks awesome but what's inside is perfect for us check this out not only does it have agp but it also has built-in video which makes this the perfect machine for flashing agp cards now it does have these little half height slots here with these little small cutouts but i think that this will still fit the agp card if i pop this out i forgot how much of a pain in the ass these old tabs where to remove all right and the card fits well fits good enough for our purposes all right i've got it set up here with a dell monitor and a matching grape usb apple keyboard and i have a usb flash drive in there with free dos and the nv flash utility and the roms for the card so let's boot this up and see if it's working okay well annoyingly this computer would not boot up using the onboard video if an agp card was installed and there was no option in the bios to actually override that like there is in oh every other computer ever made so i had to update the bios and when i got the most recent version of the bios on here the only option i had was to choose whether i did pci or agp as the first video card to initialize so i had to dig out a pci video card from my file server actually and i set that setting to boot using pci over agp and that works so now we can boot into free dos and try to flash this card all right so here we are in lovely freedos and i've already got nv flash on here i almost typed ls so we've got nv flash and i think we do nv flash slash b backup dot rom and that should create a backup of the rom on the card already all right i found the 6200 saving of image completed so dir we've got backup dot rom all right so now nv flash slash p slash u slash f and cube n1.rom and this rom is the cube specific rom that also has a slight underclock to keep the hopefully to keep the heat down all right here we go well that didn't work all right let's try a slightly different version of nv flash 5.13 all right we'll try making a back up again just to make sure it's working all right backup complete let's try the flash all right board id mismatch which should just be a dash 4 in here all right update display adapter firmware yes supported eeprom not found okay let's try nv flash 5.4 all right it asked me more questions this time what cannot program a non-page boundary yeah that's probably not good because it already cleared the original firmware okay let's try this with a slightly different rom so so i have cool dot rom which i think is the real underclocked version hey i think it's working look at that update successful we did it so that's pretty annoying that it was just the wrong version of the rom but hey who am i to complain so if you want to do this yourself get nv flash 5.4 and the underclocked version of the wang rom okay now before we install the new card let's get a little bit of a benchmark of what leopard is like on the cube here so just for reference we have our 1.2 gigahertz g4 and 1.5 gigs of ram running 10 5 8 leopard and the interface honestly uh it's pretty slow so there's a lot of lag in the taskbar and of course i could turn off the 3d effect here to speed it up a bit but i think it's important let's see how well the new card handles this fancy graphical taskbar and then as far as benchmarks the main one that i want to run here is xbench and we'll just let it run through all of its paces okay so here is what xbench thinks of our stock graphics card which is a rage 128 pro which is a 16 megabyte card and i'm no expert in what any of this stuff really means but what's more important is how much more we get with the new card so i'm going to save this as stock all right let's install the new card okay now part i'm really not looking forward to we have to tape over pins 3 and 11 on here because those pins apple kind of usurped for the adc power to the monitor but this later agp card actually uses those pins for other stuff in more powerful agp systems so the cube will not boot if pins 3 and 11 on the back of the card are connected so i'm just gonna try this i couldn't find any videos or pictures or anything of people doing this in the past some people have cut the pins but i don't want to do that so i'm just going to put tape over them and then i have my handy kershaw knife here that i'm going to try to precision cut around those pins okay so the video card we're replacing is right here and it's very easy to get to but the only problem is i'm not sure how well this agp card is going to fit in this slot because it's a slightly different configuration especially the dvi connector here is going to be quite far against the edge of this kind of opening that's in here which is of course not standard and i have heard stories of people actually dremeling out part of this to accommodate this card better and i'd really prefer not to do that even though this kind of metal assembly was already pretty damaged from the person i got it from as you can see it's already very chewed up up here so i mean i won't rule it out dremeling through here but i'm gonna try to do this without doing that okay so that kind of fits in there just fine as long as you don't mind it being relatively not secured so we've got vga loose in here of course because i don't have the bracket because there's no way the bracket's going to fit in here from your card originally but dvi is right here and it does fit outside of the cutout here and there is enough room between the edge of the connector and the edge of the cutout for the monitor to actually plug into dvi here and it's a little bit unfortunate about vga but maybe if you have any ideas of how i can get an actual nice bracket here if i can 3d print or cut something out or maybe you've seen somebody who's done this before and they actually have that but for now i think it's fine to leave this just unattached since you know you're not moving the cube around and to just be very careful with it especially to see if this works and although we do lose the wonders of adc with this upgrade i do have this gigantic adapter that will let us continue to use this beautiful monitor alright while taping those pins was a huge pain but i've done it and i have it installed and i have the monitor connected and powered on so next step is let's turn this on and before i do why don't you guys take a moment go down in the comments place your bets do you think this is gonna work straight as it is first try or do you think something's gonna go horribly wrong so give me a percentage chance is this gonna work first try all right here we go ah that's not good okay so i've reinstalled the card in our weird pc and i have reflashed the backup rom to it and well i have some bad news it appears our 6200 is toast and stupid me i did not think to test this card in a pc before we flashed the mac rom to it so i have no idea whether this came broken as an 18 card on ebay or whether i've completely ruined it somewhere in this process but never fear i also have good news in that i found a box copy of the same card and we are definitely going to test this first in the weird desktop to make sure it works and then we'll try flashing this card all right i've got the new card hooked up to vga back here and let's see if it works oh man now that's a relief so yeah the car definitely works with the original firmware on there so i guess let's install the pci video card make a backup of this firmware and then reflash it with the mac rom looking good all right update successful let's install this card into the cube all right so i've got the card installed and this time i've actually removed the pins 3 and 11 with the tip of my knife so they're physically removed and let's see if it works look at that it's alive that's amazing that's the best apple logo i have ever seen in my entire life and just look how nicely this card fits the cube's internals it is far shorter than the card that came with the cube the rage 128 pro and vga is actually detachable on this little ribbon cable extender deal and we don't need vga because dvi is what this adapter takes so yeah that's like a match made in heaven so since we're running a leopard there's one other thing that we should do which is to stop it from trying to check the temperature of the card because otherwise it takes like four or five minutes for the cube to boot up because it's not able to check the temperature you have to do is find apple hw sensor.kext and delete it and i'll just restart to make sure i didn't destroy the system all right and that booted right up and just from a general feel standpoint this is so much smoother than it was before and if we check about this mac and go into system profiler let's see what this thinks of the video card yep geforce 6200 256 mags of vram looking pretty good all right let's run our benchmarks all right test complete and we have our scores and again while i don't know exactly what these numbers mean i do know that they are better and i will put both results side by side up here so you can see for yourself and now what graphics card upgrade would be complete without a little bit of gaming so let's try out some return to castle wolfenstein and of course i don't have any speakers hooked up but we're not here to test sound all right feels pretty snappy let's see options system we're running at 640 by 480. let's chalk that up to our full resolution 1024 by 768. oh yeah silky smooth oh man this runs beautifully look at that would help if i remembered the controls wow buttery smooth and i wish there was some way to view the frame rate but evidently there is not all right these are absolutely maxed out settings and yeah it is extremely smooth let's go murder somebody real quick now look at this poor fellow sorry friend i couldn't save you all right this is excellent the cube is working just fine and graphics are super smooth so let's get this back together and see our finished product well there we go this cube is now about as pumped up as a cube can possibly be and just to recap we have a 1.2 gigahertz sonnet g4 processor upgrade up from the stock 500 megahertz we have an mcada ssd in here we have 1.5 gigs of ram and we have our 256 megabyte xfx 6200 card which puts anything that was meant for this machine to absolute shame so as far as what's next for this crazy maxed out cube i want to figure out some kind of a bracket solution for the video card so it's not just kind of floating around in there and then honestly i'm gonna use this machine i'm gonna play old games on this cube and it's gonna be awesome so if you like this video and all these crazy things we've done to the cube i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you want to see more macintosh shenanigans like this please subscribe thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to chris justin sorta eclectic and spike who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping make these shenanigans possible [Music] you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 76,543

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: s4Cy3hkF640

Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020