01-11-2009, 10:28 AM

Hi, I tryed upgrade my girlfriend's Mac (G4 PowerPC) from Mac OS X 10.2 to 10.3 (because her new printer only works with >10.3). During the installation I faced a problem. The screen of the monitor just displays grayscale colors. Seems like the system can't handle the graphiccard.

The SystemProfiler from 10.2 doesn't display any graphiccard informations at all. I just found an entry saying "G4 PowerPC (AGP GPU)". I opened the Mac's case and took a look at the gfx-card itself. Couldn't see any serialnumber oder productname (it just sayed "EliteMT M32L32321SB" on the Memorymodules of the card).

Anyhow I finished the installation of 10.3 but now the whole OS runs in those black/white grayscale colors. But now I can see this entry in the SystemProfiler:

ATY,Rage128:

Typ: display
Bus: AGP
Steckplatz: SLOT-A
VRAM (gesamt): 16 MB
Hersteller: ATI (0x1002)
Geräte-ID: 0x5246
Versions-ID: 0x0000
ROM-Version: 113-51809-112

Has anyone an idea what I could do about the problem? I'm very new to Macstuff and couldn't find any special drivers for the GFX-card... some other forum-entrys said I should do a firmwareupgrade, but those are only available for MAC OS 9.

01-11-2009, 11:09 AM

You could try to run the Panther update, see if that works first

Mac OS X Combined Update 10.3.9

01-11-2009, 01:44 PM

Didn't work, but I solved the problem.

Further investigations revealed the Mac is running a 3DFX Voodoo3 3000 card.

I opened a Terminal and entered:

sudo nvram boot-args="romndrv=1

entered my computers password and after that I rebootet.

This setting activated the Open Firmware variable and the Mac stopped skipping the loading of the Voodoo3 GFX settings