ATI AIW 128PRO now running MMC 8.7 on VIA/AMD - works great!

[lordsmurf]

Yeah, you're reading that correctly.

After 13 hours of fiddling with stuff, I now have an ATI All In Wonder 128 Pro AGP 32MB card running ATI MMC 8.7 on an AMD 1700+ system using a VIA motherboard, using Windows XP Pro.

Even using max 720x480 CBR MPEG-2 settings with VideoSoap on heavy, the computer works fine with no dropped frames and the 128PRO card works fine even with VideoSoap. Quality looks great, a Theatre Rage (100) chip doing its job.

I followed many methods, some of of just pure madness ... I'll write a guide for this soon when I find some time. It involved a lot of experimenting, so any guide I make will be somewhat vague, but I kept notes (unlike past things I've done). It involved a special hack patch from a Rage3D forums user, and then some installation of other files not meant for the 128PRO but worked anyway (something not mentioned anywhere else either).

I still want to check out audio sync, but the soundcard in this computer is defective, so I cannot hear anything real well. It's probably fine too.

For those curious right now, this is what I used:



Yes, it's a big bunch of files, but I did use most of them in the process. If you plan to do this in the future, I suggest you go download some of these things from ATI.com right now. These are all Windows XP files and hacks. All previous people that I built from also did XP (either Home or Pro). So I suggest you get Win2K or WinXP if you plan to hack the card, but feel free to experiment on your own and try to find the Win98/ME versions of this drivers/software if you want. Have fun.

I'll be back with more in due time. As I said, if you plan to do this to your card too, get to downloading. Especially if you are not on a broadband connection.

So far the only drawback to using ATI MMC 8.7 on the 128 PRO card is that the EAZYLOOK garbage whines at you with an error message before MMC starts each time.

[racerxnet]

Do not forget to install the latency patch from George Breese or the Via patch #1.05 if you have a 266A chipset or below. It is a known issue with VIA's chipset design.