Hi !

Related to tdfx BIOS editor, any Banshee owner should be aware that first Banshee cards shipped with BIOS 1.00.01-ET (ET stays for Etron, a SGRAM vendor).

If you buy on eBay a Banshee card that shows garbage on screen after installing a valid driver, check the BIOS version at boot. If it is 1.00.01-ET then the board isn't damaged. You must simply flash the Banshee card with BIOS 1.00.03-ET or 1.00.10-SG.

But there is another method :
- before you begin, you should create a recovery disk (Seraphic's recovery disk)
- dump the BIOS 1.00.01-ET (with AIDA 32)
- edit the dumped BIOS with tdfx BIOS editor 1.61 (or 3dfx BIOS editor 1.0)
- replace dramInit0 0x001298e9 with 0x001798e9
- replace dramInit1 0x00284031 with 0x0023c031
- DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE !
- save the changes
- flash the card with the modified BIOS
- after flashing, rename save.rom to original.rom, it's your old BIOS rom, you should copy it to a recovery disk
- reboot

Now your display should be clear without garbage.

N.B.
For safety, you should flash a Banshee only with the Banshee Flash Program

Regards

So far I know latest BIOS for Creative 3D Blaster Banshee was 1.03.2D. It's a custom BIOS, not a 3Dfx Reference BIOS... Leave it alone !

I bought the Guillemot Maxi Gamer Phoenix, because Guillemot always did 3Dfx reference boards since Voodoo1. My Banshee is a reference board, therefore uses reference BIOS. The only difference concerns SubVendorID and SubDeviceID.

Larry Coffey is a programmer of Elpin Systems. He wrote some parts of BIOS code.   You can find him in the 3dfx source code with Ultra-Edit (search within files).

There are 3 Reference BIOSes
VGA BIOS 1.00.01 04/19/98
VGA BIOS 1.00.03 10/10/98
VGA BIOS 1.00.10 02/09/99

BTW DumpBIOS64 is a good choice, but it saves only 64 KB VGA BIOSes. So even a 32 KB BIOS (like Banshee BIOS) will be saved as 64 KB BIOS (zero fills for remaining 32 KB space). I think AIDA 32 is better (Information | Debug | Video BIOS Dump)

Regards