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

hum, I got a creative labs 3D Blaster Banshee here

with
VGA BIOS - Version 1.01.01-ET
Copyright 1990-1998 Elpin Systems, Inc.
3dfx Interactive, Inc

I used some progam I just found called "dumpbios64" and I checked the date with a hexeditor and I found this in my bios dump "01/06/99" and towards the end I found this
"Written by: Larry Coffey 5/21/90". Let me guess the author of the rom dump tool?

The date is significant though because I believe I have the latest BIOS from Creative labs and I just looked at another BIOS "agp_sgram.rom" and with a hexeditor it was dated "02/09/99".

Maybe I need to find a better program to dump my bios?

EP

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

OK thanks for the info PHOENIX.

I noticed that now since I got another creative labs BIOS. I thought I had the latest BIOS version. I got this card back in July of 99. I also thought when I tried to update the BIOS with the last creative drivers it told me my bios was already up to date.

Well I checked the two versions, mine is 01/06/99 ver 1.01.01 where as the latest one is supposedly 01/15/99 ver 1.03.2.  Looks like I'll have to further research this myself. Of course, I'm not just going to just flash it. Mine has been ver 1.01.01 this long so I will wait and do some checking around first.

The strange thing about these creative labs cards is under 98 the memory clock can be set to 110 but under Windows XP the machine locks up after a short while unless it is set to 100. So if I update the BIOS I don't want 110 for the default memory clock.

Thanks and any further advice is welcome,

EP