Guide to ATi Flashing

Hello, This is the quick and easy guide to flashing your ati card. In this tutorial we will use the 9800 pro to 9800 XT (128megs).

Ok,these are the steps to flash the bios of your video card. Download dr.dos from here and use it to make a dr.dos boot disc. At that point download Flashrom 2.xx. After making the disc, copy the contents of the flashrom archive into the disc. Reboot and boot into the floppy.
Type at the prompt: flashrom -s 0 original.bin .[This saves your original bios into original.bin]
After that type: flashrom -p 0 xxx.bin . [This flashes your card to the new bios. make sure to replace the xxx with the bios name].

If you want to do some crazy flashing that is not the same size as your current core, add -r before the -p to force flashing, regardless if the sizes or placement is different. Your memory type is important. Look up your memory kind (Samsung 2.5ns ,Hynix 2.5ns, E-Die), and get the right bios. Remember this when flashing a 9800 pro; R350 cores do not take advantage of the flashing! If you are unsure of what core you have (R350 or R360), take off your heatsink and it should have written R350 or R360. R360s continue flashing, otherwise you can still flash with a R350 to give you tighter memory timings but in some instances with R350 cores (like mine) they tend to artifact from time to time due to the XT's ability to use a new shader tract that is not included with R350 cores but is dormant in R360s- they can be activated via flashing. Lastly, keep in mind is not to use WinFlash. WinFlash is not recommended because of the instability both by program and by windows.

List of 9800 pro 128 meg bioses can be found Here and Here and Here

Generic bios for most ATi Cards can be found here

Homebrew ISO + Instructions
Ok, I have made a fast image of all the bioses i could find on a bootable cdrom. This took a while but hopefully it will solve the high demand of bootable cdroms. The directories are divided in 128MB/256MB and type of ram. If you see Samsung_, it stands for Samsung E-die ram. Likewise, the regular Samsung is just Samsung. Just burn it and boot out of it. Then once booted, at the prompt type "CD \" followed by "DIR". You will then see the directory called "bios" in the listings. Navigate through there and find yours.

Lets say your bios is in, "f:\bios\9800XT\128MB\Samsung\Herclues.98.rom". Once in the directory of your bios, type "f:\flashrom -p 0 hercules.98.rom". Replace "f:" with whatever letter your cdrom was given. I've included 9800xt,9800xx,9600xx,9500xx,9200xx, and 9000xx bioses on the disc. sorry for the lack of lamance terms/ strategy.DOWNLOAD IT HERE

Great Sticky! Thanks!

could I make the boot disk on a CD-R instead of a 3.25" floppy? I don't have a floppy drive installed.

sure as long as it boots dr.dos

That's what I used.

hmmm... my card isn't listed there, I guess I have to go hunting.

sexy, thanks bro

no prob

Have to have a R360 core too, R350 won't work which is what my 9800Pro is...Just got it two days ago and was hoping for R360 but no dice

you dont need a 360, i flashed mine and i used a R350 core

Yes I did a little more research and I see that you can flash a R350 cored card, my mistake. If I understand correctly, the R350 core doesn't include the extra shader optimizations that the R360 core does. Which is the main point for flashing the R360's in the first place, to unlock those shader optimizations. So flashing the R350 doesn't really do anything but change the default core clock and memory speeds...using something like ATITool or Radclocker for the R350 would be "safer" than flashing. Is there something I missed?

**update**

ATI tool was reporting that I had a R350 chipset...However, I used the Dump Bios tool to save an image and I opened the .bin file up with notepad and i saw this: R360 Hynix DDR 113-A07537-103 BIOS so I guess I do have an R360 core!

didnt you read what i wrote? I said that atitool or anything else windows based is to unstable making it more possible to messup and corrupt ur chip.