[rescue] Using a Fire V240 as a desktop...

[John Ruschmeyer]

> From: rescue-bounces at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-bounces at sunhelp.org] On
> Behalf Of Joshua Boyd
> Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2010 3:07 PM
> To: The Rescue List
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Using a Fire V240 as a desktop...
> 
> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 02:27:41PM -0500, John Ruschmeyer wrote:
> > Maybe... but it looks like we're talking upwards of $100 for what
> amounts to
> > a Radeon 7000 PCI as an upgrade for a $10 workstation.
> >
> > Is it possible to flash a PC Radeon with Sun firmware (as is done
> with Mac
> > firmware)?
> 
> To my understanding, people have done that.  I think that, like
> flashing
> for Mac, you do have to make sure the PC card has a large enough flash
> chip.  Also, I'm not sure where you get the firmware.

It turns out that the firmware is relatively easy to find. General Dynamics
apparently had an XVR-100 firmware updater on their CHS2 (Army Common
Hardware Software ver 2) support site. It has been mirrored in a few places
including the Internet Archive.

I have a card which should work. It's a PC Radeon 7000 which I already
flashed to the Mac ROM some time ago. It currently resides in a B&W G3 which
I haven't used in a few months and have been meaning to find a new home for.

I think I still have my bootable floppy from when I flashed the Mac ROM, so
I should just need to copy over the Sparc ROM file and throw everything into
the PC for updating.

Hopefully, I can get to somewhere over the next few days.

John