Thomas M

Q: PowerMac 6500 and Rage 128

Is there any reason a pci Rage 128 won't play nice with a Powermac 6500?  I've tried two Rage 128s (both from B&W G3s) on it so far and nothing works.  In fact, in System Profiler it just shows up as a generic "display card".

 

I have tested both cards in a G3 and they display fine.  I'm using the drivers included with Mac 9.1.

Posted on Oct 11, 2011 5:11 PM

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Q: PowerMac 6500 and Rage 128

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  • by Allan Jones,

    Allan Jones Allan Jones Oct 11, 2011 6:51 PM in response to Thomas M
    Level 8 (35,296 points)
    iPad
    Oct 11, 2011 6:51 PM in response to Thomas M

    Not sure. I have a PowerMac 7600/132 running OS 8.6 and I installed a retail ATI Rage 128 Orion card with 16MB VRAM and it works like a charm. The card was bought for a Beige G3 and became surplus when I upgraded the G3 to an original ATI Radeon 32MB VRAM card (not the later and less effective Radeon 7000).

     

    Do you see the little ATI control center icon in the menu bar?

     

    I needed older drivers that were not on the ATI (now part of AMD) website and e-mailed them.They sent s zip file with all the old drivers. However, the retail cards often used a different set of drivers than those for an Apple-installed card.

  • by Texas Mac Man,

    Texas Mac Man Texas Mac Man Oct 12, 2011 5:46 AM in response to Thomas M
    Level 8 (46,611 points)
    Oct 12, 2011 5:46 AM in response to Thomas M

    There's a lot of great info on 6400/6500 Macs at the 6400Zone http://www.zone6400.com/

     

    I did a search of that site and got this list for Rahe 128:

    http://search.freefind.com/find.html?id=625717&pid=r&mode=ALL&n=0&query=rage+128

     

     Cheers, Tom

  • by Jeff,

    Jeff Jeff Oct 12, 2011 10:32 PM in response to Thomas M
    Level 6 (11,559 points)
    Oct 12, 2011 10:32 PM in response to Thomas M

    Since these cards were pulled from B&W G3s, they should be the "Apple-branded" version of ATI's comparable Rage 128 GPU cards for Macs.  You've indicated that you're using the ATI Rage 128 driver that's included with OS 9.1, so the card should be recognized and you should see 2-D acceleration (smooth scrolling).  Could your problem simply be the result of not depressing the CUDA reset on the 6500's motherboard, prior to sliding it back into the chassis?

  • by Thomas M,

    Thomas M Thomas M Oct 12, 2011 11:33 PM in response to Jeff
    Level 4 (1,154 points)
    Oct 12, 2011 11:33 PM in response to Jeff

    Yea, I'm using Apple's built-in ATI drivers for now.  I did press the CUDA button but do you have to hold it down for a certain amound of time?

     

    From what I've looked into since my initial problems, it seems that 6400/6500s had a lot of problems with Rage 128s in the past.  I might just be out of luck.

  • by Allan Jones,

    Allan Jones Allan Jones Oct 14, 2011 12:24 PM in response to Thomas M
    Level 8 (35,296 points)
    iPad
    Oct 14, 2011 12:24 PM in response to Thomas M

    Jeff's call on the CUDA was great; I've not played with our "Old World ROM" Macs in a while and totally spaced that.

     

    I did press the CUDA button but do you have to hold it down for a certain amount of time?

     

    Yes, on the Old World ROM Macs, you ned to press and hold for 10-20 seconds to clear the PRAM contents so  the computer can poll for new hardware. However don't do this on any Mac with built-in USB ports. Very messy!