Information on VESA modes in ATI&NVIDIA bios

[twilight.lee]

Thank you , lebidou. Your explanation are very clear.

[phr0z]

Thanks for the explanation!

 

However I forgot to mention that I did in fact flash my bios with the edited one

 

Though.. I did it a bit sketchy, I didn't use nvflash and I did edit it with NiBiTor to get the checksum ok and flashed it with Gigabytes utility for windows.

 

Perhaps it did something along the way... hard to tell.

 

I'll try nvflash on a new hexedited bios file this weekend and post the result.

[phr0z]

Can't get my monitor to display fullscreen with this..

 

Tried flashing it with nvflash this time.

 

 

 

It stretches the screen if I use VGA.

 

 

 

Oh well..

[jamesah]

Can anyone tell me what exactly this fixes or does? I don't understand. Sorry for my newbieness

[DieBuche]

This fix get's rid of a stretched gui in the bootloader, in case ur using a widescreen monitor.

 

@ everybody asking for a patched bios:

The hard bios flash is quite risky, especially if you don't know how to recover. lebidou has been working on a modified chameleon booter, which will modify the resolution modes when booting. Please see this topic for more info. Please try that booter and report about success/failure there

[theakseffect]

How do I use this without OSX installed on my laptop (see specs in sig)?

 

Fyi: I can't get SL to boot either (I get KP or a black screen and reboot right after apple logo (which is within 2 seconds)). I used the following methods:

 

Chameleon RC2

Boot-132 + SL retail (no idea which bootloader, it has a nice little gui though)

SL Hazard distro

commands: -v -x -s -f cpus=1 GraphicsEnabler=n arch=i386 and "Graphics Mode"="1024x768x16"

[El Massman]

tried the hex patch with no success on a 7600gs. limited success with the the patched chameleon. the resolution seems right although squashed into the top two thirds of the screen. resolution returns on hitting the osx gui although the system then kernel panics on logging in. i have a feeling this may be to do with running in 64 bit mode though. i used to get that with rc4 until i added the arch=x86_32 flag. is that still accepted by the rc5 mod? this'd be great to get working.

[El Massman]

on a slightly different note... out of curiosity i tried using a dvi to vga adaptor and plugging the graphics card into my monitor that way. this brings up a bigger list of 'supported resolutions'. still none of which are the one i patched though. one that did stand out however is '1400x1050'. with my monitor's native resolution being 1680x1050 it would seem like that is the highest 4:3 resolution i should be able to use in chameleon under normal circumstances but the max i get is 1280x1024. why does using a dvi connection restrict the maximum resolution. that just seems odd since i'd consider dvi to be the superior connection.

 

thanks

 

marc

[lebidou]

tried the hex patch with no success on a 7600gs. limited success with the the patched chameleon. the resolution seems right although squashed into the top two thirds of the screen. resolution returns on hitting the osx gui although the system then kernel panics on logging in. i have a feeling this may be to do with running in 64 bit mode though. i used to get that with rc4 until i added the arch=x86_32 flag. is that still accepted by the rc5 mod? this'd be great to get working.

 

You should try arch=i386, I'm not sure arch=x86_32 is still used since it's not an official architecture name. For the resolution limitation, it seems to be due to VESA implementation in the motherboard's BIOS. It's an issue that has already been encountered. I'm currently working on solving it, along with the so called 'bottom bug' on Nvidia cards.

[El Massman]

thanks for getting back to me. i'll give it a go with i386 and see what i get. i'll keep testing each time you put something new out too. keep up the great work.

 

marc

[theakseffect]

How do I use this without OSX installed on my laptop (see specs in sig)?

 

Fyi: I can't get SL to boot either (I get KP or a black screen and reboot right after apple logo (which is within 2 seconds)). I used the following methods:

 

Chameleon RC2

Boot-132 + SL retail (no idea which bootloader, it has a nice little gui though)

SL Hazard distro

commands: -v -x -s -f cpus=1 GraphicsEnabler=n arch=i386 and "Graphics Mode"="1024x768x16"

 

Any1?

[atlee]

Any1?

 

Dont use RC2 it's old and probably is what is causing the KP, Use RC4 boot discs like Empire EFI or tonymacx86 [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] CD.

[atlee]

Tried to use this on my ATI 5770

 

Error message >

 

Attempting to open bios.rom

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'

what(): std::bad_alloc

Abort trap

[T-Bone90]

Thanks a lot, very good Tutorial.

 

I have mod my 4870 BIOS, nowe I have 1920x1080 in VESA, but my Chameleon don't show this Resolution :-(

 

What is the Error ?

[tolga9009]

The main goal of this isn't just to get chameleon to the native resolution, it's to have native resolution in MacOS since the first boot after installation (and maybe during installation), before you've set up GraphicsEnabler, messed with your kexts and all. And to keep native resolution if you have to disable GraphicsEnabler for a while... To have native resolution, no matter what.

I don't know, if I understood you correctly, but is it also possible to have an unstretched (bios) boot logo with this method? The resolution of the bios boot splash is 800x600 and is transmitted as a 800x600 picture to the LCD monitor, where it finally gets scaled up to fill the screen. However, I'd prefer my LCD monitor not to stretch up the picture, but to center it, leaving it at its native resolution and showing it really sharp. Telling my graphics card to send out 1920x1080 pics, (so my LCD display doesn't stretch it up) using this method, will it do the job?

 

//Edit: I'm talking about the hardflash method.

 

//Edit2: I thought about it last night and I came to the following conclusion: I need the GPU to tell that he'll do the upscale with an unstretched, centered picture, so the display will just show the received 1920x1080 picture from the GPU. So, the GPU has to do everything. Any ideas how to do it?

[frantisheq]

works with Radeon HD 4550. thanks a lot

[carbondry]

This post is fine for analyzing the bios, but how do I actually change it?

[Time2Retire]

@DieBuche,

 

I don't know if you are still around... looking at your posts; the last one was, apparently, made on: Jul 16 2010, 07:35 PM so I'm not too sure. Anyway. I located 17 video modes in the Intel GMA 5700 Graphics BIOS and was wondering if you also located the VESA mode table, as I did. These are reported in Chameleon when you use ?video at the boot prompt.

 

Anyone else maybe? Just in case

[pasha_infest]

anybody get this work on gf9600gt 512 mb (G94 chip)????

 

i'm flash my card with patched bios, but it doesn't work 4 me! help please! my orig bios here. need a 1920x1080x32 resolution

9600.rom.zip

[nothanksyou]

2. Structure of VESA modes in NVIDIA VBIOS

 

The other mode table is 512 bytes long, containing 16 modes, each 32 byte long.

 

Here is a sample mode from an 8800GTS

 

00 04 FF 03 00 00 FF 03 17 04 9F 04 3F 05 00 03 FF 02 00 00 FF 02 02 03 08 03 25 03 00 FF 30 2A

 

Actually, the mode entry starts 2 bytes earlier. The

30 2A

listed above belong to the next mode entry. These two bytes specify the dot (pixel) clock. 2A30h (=10800) corresponds to a dot clock of 108.00MHz.

[tolga9009]

One question: anyone besides JJJohan got this working with an HD5XXX card? AnalyseVBIOS just works for HD3XXX and HD4XXX cards; for the HD5XXX series, AnalyseVBIOS gives no output besides the length of the file. I tried 3 different bioses: Sapphire HD5870, ASUS HD5870 and XFX HD5770.

I also tried to manually find the locations (and I found them!) and changed the values. I ended up blindflashing my card; so you can imagine what happened.

 

I just got the feeling, that the HD5000 series cards aren't compatible with this mod.

[FKA]

I agree - I've had no luck with my 5770 either ..

 

ANVal bootloader has an AutoResolution key that reads EDID at boot and works a treat.

If the sources become available I think this would be a great feature to add to the Chameleon trunk!

 

D

[Twa]

I agree - I've had no luck with my 5770 either ..

 

ANVal bootloader has an AutoResolution key that reads EDID at boot and works a treat.

If the sources become available I think this would be a great feature to add to the Chameleon trunk!

 

D

 

Any one have code for 1600x900 ? and How can I know what bytes my card is using ? (285 GTX)

 

and Can I add another RES to next empty Decimal ?

[Azimutz]

I agree - I've had no luck with my 5770 either ..

 

ANVal bootloader has an AutoResolution key that reads EDID at boot and works a treat.

If the sources become available I think this would be a great feature to add to the Chameleon trunk!

 

D

FKA, the sources for AutoResolution are available long time ago:

original topic: http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,1227.0.html

repo branch: http://forge.voodooprojects.org/p/chameleo.../autoResolution

 

But, don't expect this to be included on the trunk. It doesn't work for everyone that might need it.

If/when Chameleon gets "modules" support, then we can create a module out of it and people can try/use it.

Anyway, if you or anyone else wants to add this to your "private" Chameleon, your best shot is take it from my branch;

it's been there since ever and i even try to maintain it, since i actually use it

 

Stay safe

[FKA]

FKA, the sources for AutoResolution are available long time ago:

original topic: http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,1227.0.html

repo branch: http://forge.voodooprojects.org/p/chameleo.../autoResolution

 

But, don't expect this to be included on the trunk. It doesn't work for everyone that might need it.

If/when Chameleon gets "modules" support, then we can create a module out of it and people can try/use it.

Anyway, if you or anyone else wants to add this to your "private" Chameleon, your best shot is take it from my branch;

it's been there since ever and i even try to maintain it, since i actually use it

 

Stay safe

 

I've looked at that page a thousand times - How did I miss that

 

 

D