How to upgrade drivers on a softmod 9500-9700 (Win98)

[O.Phooey]

Using Unwinders Win98 softmod for the 9500np to 9700 I was able to
sex-up my ATI card. I believe those were for the Catalyst 3.6 drivers.
If i upgrade my drivers will the soft mod be lost? I'm new at this and
the softmod took awhile before it worked. There's a game that needs
the 3.9 drivers.

 

[Sham B]

You can hard mod it by changing the BIOS. More risky, but when you have
finished the card will always come up as a 9700 pro irrespective of driver
or OS

S

 

[Nil Einne]

You can hard mod it by changing the BIOS. More risky, but when you have
finished the card will always come up as a 9700 pro irrespective of driver
or OS

More risky? Barely.

If it's working with the softmod, it's not going to suddenly fail with
the hard mod. The only risk is that if for some reason your card dies
for whatever reason, you might not be able to flash it back with the
old bios in time (especially if you don't have a PCI card) and if you
don't flash it back it might be rejected for warranty purposes.
However, this risk isn't really that great especially if you have a
PCI card. And in most cases when your video card has problems, it
isn't a sudden death. Perhaps most importantly, there is a good chance
they won't realise/find out it has been flashed with a 9700 bios,
especially if the card is well and truly dead.

 

[Skid]

More risky? Barely.

If it's working with the softmod, it's not going to suddenly fail with
the hard mod. The only risk is that if for some reason your card dies
for whatever reason, you might not be able to flash it back with the
old bios in time (especially if you don't have a PCI card) and if you
don't flash it back it might be rejected for warranty purposes.
However, this risk isn't really that great especially if you have a
PCI card. And in most cases when your video card has problems, it
isn't a sudden death. Perhaps most importantly, there is a good chance
they won't realise/find out it has been flashed with a 9700 bios,
especially if the card is well and truly dead.

Guys, there more to the hard mod than simply flashing the bios. It involves
a "hardware" modification -- hence the name. You do a bios change after the
hard-mod, not in place of.

This is how I did mine:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/news6129.html

Once you do a hard mod and flash to a 9700 bios, you never have to worry
about updating drivers. The card IS a 9700.

 

[Dodgy]

Using Unwinders Win98 softmod for the 9500np to 9700 I was able to
sex-up my ATI card. I believe those were for the Catalyst 3.6 drivers.
If i upgrade my drivers will the soft mod be lost? I'm new at this and
the softmod took awhile before it worked. There's a game that needs
the 3.9 drivers.

www.ocfaq.com has soft modded catalyst drivers all the way up to 4.1

D0d6y.

 

[Sham B]

Guys, there more to the hard mod than simply flashing the bios. It
involves

a "hardware" modification -- hence the name. You do a bios change after the
hard-mod, not in place of.

This is how I did mine:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/news6129.html

Once you do a hard mod and flash to a 9700 bios, you never have to worry
about updating drivers. The card IS a 9700.

Hmmm. All I did was reflash it, and didnt even know there was any link to
make. My card comes up in all hardware dialogs as a 9700 pro. I have one
of the older 9500 pros though, so perhaps that had less protection (all it
had was the BIOS overclock lock).

Oh, the only hardware mod I made was to add an artic cooler, to allow mucho
overclocking of the gfx processor

S

 

[Skid]

Hmmm. All I did was reflash it, and didnt even know there was any link to
make. My card comes up in all hardware dialogs as a 9700 pro. I have one
of the older 9500 pros though, so perhaps that had less protection (all it
had was the BIOS overclock lock).

Oh, the only hardware mod I made was to add an artic cooler, to allow mucho
overclocking of the gfx processor

If you have a 9500 Pro, there is no way to mod it to a 9700 Pro, no matter
what bios you use or how high you overclock.

The only card that could be modded was a 9500 non-pro with an L-shaped
memory configuration (and they stopped making those when ATI found out about
the mod.) It had 256-bit memory addressing and four closed rendering
pipelines that could be opened by the mod.

The Pro has all eight pipelines open, but the four-in-line memory layout
means it is locked at 128-bit. You could flash the bios to enable
overclocking, but it is physically impossible to mod it to a full-fleged
pro.

Check this for confirmation:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/news6145.html

If you want to know more about how and why this is all done, visit the
tweaking forum at www.rage3d.com and search for "9500 mod"

 

[O.Phooey]

www.ocfaq.com has soft modded catalyst drivers all the way up to 4.1

D0d6y.

Only for Win2K and XP. I think only Unwinder/ Rivatuner wrote them for
Win98 and that may be the last. I guess I could ask him on the forum,
but he's testy if you ask dumb questions.....Maybe I'll use your
handle...
)