Flashing AEC6280 for Mac use

[ttyR2]

Howdy folks! First time posting here. I've been surfing the forum for a few weeks and figured I should register.

I successfully replacing the eeprom on an ATI Radeon 7000 after flashing the chip using a CH341 programmer and having the card work perfectly in my beige G3.

I'm now trying to tackle flashing an ACARD AEC6280. I found various posts including the one at http://www.synack.net/~bbraun/aec6280m.html. I removed R71, and soldered a small conventional 1K resistor carefully in place of R19. Then I plugged the card in to my beige G3 and ran the Mac flash utility. The utility wasn't able to read the existing firmware version but showed what it was going to flash the card to. I proceeded and it said it was successful followed by a restart. The card still shows as a generic PCI1911/9 in Apple System Profiler. What was interesting is if I run the wrong flash utility (for a different model of card) it says no card detected, but I don't get that when running the AEC6280 card, so that makes me think the utility is seeing the card.

On the synack page, he said he flashed the card using an old Win98 machine but didn't give any details. I created a bootable FreeDOS thumbdrive, put the flash utilities on that and included the v208 Mac .bin file, but the flash utility says the .bin isn't a BIOS and won't proceed.

I did find and tried the ACARD-KAY 2 utilities that were in another post on the forum here, but the files seem to be broken. I copied the zip file straight to the Mac and used Stuffit to open it up. It looks like all the file type/creator info is missing, and even when I set those, the utilities don't seem to do anything. I was attempting to follow advice to blank the eeprom first, and then to upload the AEC6280M firmware.

I'm looking for some clues as to steps I'm missing.

 

[trag]

I don't have an answer to your question but am also interested in the solution/trouble shooting.

I will contribute that you should check the Revision of the card. The revision is typically silk screened on the circuit board pretty much dead center. Sometimes it's covered by a sticker.

The later revisions are rather different from the Rev. 1. Braun's instructions are for Rev. 1, I believe.

A year or two ago I was banging my head against converting a Rev. 3 and I had the Mac version right next to it, but could never get it to work.

There was a guy in the UseNet groups, LEMLists and many of the early forums who went by the handle PeterHnnnn (where nnnn was some numerals) and he seemed to have some inside info on how the cards were engineering. Anyone remember/seen him anywhere?

 

[ttyR2]

It's labeled AEC6280 REV: 1.0 and has the ACARD chip on it, as opposed to the ACHIP chip. So it should match up with what Braun did.

 

[trag]

Yes it should. Did you clean up after soldering the resistors? Even if there's no solder bridges, residual solder flux can cause issues. So a flux remover or just an isopropyl scrub is good practice. Other that I'm out of ideas and eagerly awaiting when you have that eureka moment, so I know another thing to look out for.

 

[ttyR2]

No, I didn't. I'll clean the flux off, but there wasn't much. I also checked under a microscope to make sure I didn't leave any solder bridges.

 

[trag]

I had an Adaptec 3940U I converted way back when. Desolder/solder the PLCC32 EEPROM. Didn't work, until some nice fellow recommended I clean up residual flux. Then it did. It's a longshot, but might do the trick.