I know this chipset is rather old and somewhat ill-favored around here, but for my own personal satisfaction and for those of you who might actually use it, progress is officially underway toward getting hardware graphics acceleration (what little there is of it) working on these chips. I've been keeping track of the dri-devel mailing list, and someone said he had the chip "mostly working" this morning. First project is to figure out how the card is driven; second project is to port that functionality to the OS X kernel. If anyone can shed some light on how the video driver process works in OS X, I would greatly appreciate any and all links. Thanks!

Yea... this would be great (i have a xpress x1150) , because i have gived up the fight after one week

Wow! I'm waiting too...

I'm afraid I can't guarantee results, most especially for chips other than the Xpress 200M. I do not have access to any other test machines, nor funds to purchase said machines. That being said, if it magically happens to work on another chipset, congratulations. If not, then you're out of luck unless you want to study my process and do it yourself.

Well as I have said many times in many other threads, I am more then happy to beta any x200 software for any developers out there.

I would be fierce to try all the Beta drivers you make!!!!

That's the greatest thing i ever heard around here!!! Keep that good thing going!!!

Thanks for the effort, my old HP laptop could use better support!

I am definitely in on this too. My Gateway laptop has the X200m. Will offer to beta test also.

Awesome stuff
I know the chipset is quite old, but V3000 series compaq's and fairly new vista based machines are still using it for its integrated "3D" Power . My v2000 is awesome exept for this damned graphics card, which ive had trouble with everything from XP to ubuntu

If you need a beta tester my lappy is always running 10.4.8 and im more than happy to wipe it for other versions of osx

i am waiiting too for test on my laptop HP compaq nx6125.
i will be here for test any beta version

Dopefish,
Look forward to hearing about any progress you have made.

Other users,
Please people if you are not experienced with running OS X on a hackintosh already, as one would assume from you users who don't have even 10 posts to your name, please do not request anything beta.

Beta on a Hackintosh takes on a whole new meaning. You need to be familiar with the terminal, file permissions, editing hardware ID's, and other non-noob functions. When inexperienced people try to get in on betas it leads to projects getting bogged down. The developer (in this case Dopefish) has to take time and answer basic questions that the more advanced users already know.

This is not designed to exclude people, simply allow the most competent people to test and develop the software to the point where it is mature enough for regular Mac people to understand how to install and configure this.

we can t see the knowledge of a person with the number of post he did.
i know i am a beginner in the Hackintosh domain but i had been using Linux for 4 years.
I know what is a terminal and so on.. and maybe for some others users who didn t post already know also.

i sent the post for support and encourage thedopefishlives, and of course i will do my best and try many times a future beta version before ask stupid questions.

i think, in this forum there are enough information for install your Hackintosh without post any question.

i will do what i can for make this project successful.

I agree with you Zapoutix , i'm working as a customer support engineer and i'm using the Unix world everyday. But i think that Ms errand*.* speaks from the N00Bs expericence that has SURVIVED itself

I am working with DiaboliK , to see if we can get his a la natit driver to work with Radeon 9700 , at least just basic OpenGL acceleration

WOW COOL!!!

Ehm sorry if i ask , but the name "Prasys" comes from the PearPC world? I can remember that some years ago was a programmer that has released some amazing versions from PearPC with this name...

I just want to clarify something. I did not mean to imply people with few posts know nothing and shouldn't offer to help. I simply meant MOST people who don't have that many posts here yet really are probably not that familiar with OS X beyond the GUI. Certainly if you feel you have the technical knowledge needed to test software, please speak up an volunteer. I simply wanted to save the developers a ton of headaches having to answer "basic" questions while still trying to develop and enhance their software for the masses.

Prasys has been a long time contributor here at insanelymac and it's predecessor osx86project. That is fantastic news that he is working with Diabolik. Good luck you two!

Thanks errandwolfe. That's a little problem I ran into during my last OSx86 project (the ATI SB400 audio drivers). Thankfully, some of the other devs on that project fielded the whole "How do I install this plz kthx" issues. I will _try_ to build a package that is easily installed; nevertheless, beta testers should be prepared to install a bare naked .kext file, and possibly building from source.

Progress so far is a little slow, since the 200M-specific code in the open-source driver is in a mid-alpha stage. I'm also not sure what I'm going to have to write in the OSx86 world; I don't want to have to go to the effort of duplicating work done by Omni on his Callisto driver, but I'm unsure how the video architecture works and what components connect to the framebuffer driver, or how. I'll keep looking around and keep you guys updated. Oh, yeah, and I should probably find my OSx86 DVD and install it on the laptop.

Dopefish and Prasys, it is great to see you guys taking up the task. It seems like the x200 is THE budget mobility GPU, not only in older systems, but even in brand new units!

For some reason this chipset seems to be vastly loved by Windows folks and hated by everyone else. Realistically if I just had QE/CI I would have a hackintosh lappy that performs fantastically for around $500!

Please guys if there is anything I can to to help just let me know. If you do a search with my username and the term x200 you should find plenty of my older posts documenting my attempts to get QE/CI working that way you don't waste time going down any of the roads already tried.

My S270 blew up (with smoke 'n all), so I guess I'm not interested in this any more. Thanks MSI...

why don't we list out all of the feature we know about x200m.. to make life easiers for Dopefish, Prasys, DiaboliK... help them narrow down problem.. maybe we help them out too.. by google around see if we find anything that could be helpful to enable QE/CI support or any information regarding to x200m and posted up..

I have all that information, thanks. What I need is documentation on the IOAccelerator class. Whenever I get XCode installed, I might - _MIGHT_ - be able to look at it. If it's not in there, though, I will need a lot of help.

ok

I am working with natit and older OpenGL frameworks

My other step is to fool the OSX that its a X300 card...If we can get all the x200 calls to be like x300 then it will work. we can do a fake 64MB Radeon X300 Mobility Card emulation

Prasys, I don't think that will work. The architecture of the x200 is fundamentally different from that of the x300 or any other Radeon to date. It will require a totally new memory controller setup in order to get QE/CI, and since ATI has no reason to implement it, it falls to us to do so.

Sorry to say but dopefish is correct. On the research I have done the x200 and x300 have very different design architectures. The main difference from my understanding is exactly how the onboard memory is addressed. If you need me to I can dig back through my archives to see what I can find for you.

Alright, first major problem. I don't think XCode comes with the right kernel headers, so right now I have absolutely _zero_ documentation on how to write an accelerator driver. The Darwin source has a basic IOAccelerator class, but it's no help. If someone could, at the very least, give ideas as to how to derive the data I need, I'd be eternally grateful.

keep fighting guys, too bad i'm not a coding kind of guy if not i'll help out... hehehe

Please let this work.. this video chipset is the only reason I am not running OS X on my laptop.

I wouldn't let that stop you... I have 10.4.8 installed (ppf1 & ppf2 iso) and I installed the callisto driver and got the native resolution working fine. It doesn't have QE enabled, but my basic interface is just as fast as my G5 is... I am not sure what QE enabled would do, but native resolution was what was buggin me... I installed the callisto 003fixed driver and followed the instructions that come with the zip to get it working...

I didn't for a while, but there were some things I wanted that I hated not having, like DVD playback, and a few games. Also, I can't run Adobe Audition in OS X.

I think there's a DVD with 200M support on demon right now

No.

Long story short - this project is pretty much dead right now. The only source of information on this subject is the binary blobs that ship with OS X.

Sad to hear but not surprising. Anyone want to buy an x200 based laptop?

Sad indeed, ive pretty much given up on osx running nice on my compaq... back to SUSE i guess

Hi,

Note a coder, but just have been following this forum with the obvious vested interests - I have an onboard Radeon Xpress 200 for my desktop. Hope someone is still reading...

I am not sure if this information might be useful but Livna has been making ATI (and nVidia) drivers for Linux for a very long time now. Though I am new to Mac OS, I am (more than) proficient with Linux and I know that the source code is distributed from Livna's site. (rpm.livna.org). That might be a way to circumvent the "secrecy" that ATI maintains. For a good programmer, it could mean a lot. To us end users, it could mean a lot too! :-)

I have used their Linux drivers for a couple of years and I get 3D acceleration (which seems to be the QE/CI that you guys keep referring to :-p) on Fedora. At times I have even compiled the drivers from source code using instructions from the website - but mostly they work out of the box. The xorg.conf file needs some tweaking for a new release sometimes...

I know for sure that a very big part of the ATI-Linux community uses these drivers over the propriety ATI drivers.

thedopefishlives : If you want to take a look, you could. :-)

It doesn't really matter. Even if these drivers are what you claim them to be, the fact still remains that I have ZERO available documentation on how to make an accelerator driver for OS X. That is a secrecy issue I just can't get around.

From what i've read on the forums the x200 is essentially a dedicated memory version of the x300 which uses shared system memory. And the memory addressing is the problem stopping the x200 working where as the x300 doesn't due to it using shared system memory. It's gonna sound stupid but i couldn't find evidence of anyone changing the memory from dedicated to shared system memory, something which i can do with my laptop and should in theory make the x200 basically the same as an x300? Has anyone tried this and would it have any effect at all on using conventional methods to enable QE/CI?

I believe there are 2 versions of x220. One that is dedicated and one that is shared memory. My laptop is only shared memory. There may be some point to what u are describing but so far nobody has come up with a solution. Many devs have been trying to sort this problem out as a great majority of us have laptops with this x200 chipset inside. There just seems to be no concrete info or documentation around for anyone to work with for implementing the functions of this chipset (as it is unsupported by apple) into OSX.

Many people would even donate $$$ to anyone who would be sucessful but so far there is an absolute dead end facing all of us. The problem is is that everyone who has set their foot into getting this done has given up because the mountain is just to high and the lack of info.

IMO there is always a way for anything to be done (no matter what it is). It just is the matter of how long it will take and how much effort people can devote to whatever it is.

Trust me, guys, we've tried everything. The Xpress 200 is just too different in the memory controller area.

That's really a shame. Not on you. But it's definitely disappointing.

here my report for x200m might help!.. check it out guy!
Click to view attachment

Name ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 Series
Manufacturer ATI Technologies Inc
Device ID 0x5950
Vendor ID 0x1002
Class Code 0x060000
Revision ID 0x10
Subsystem ID 0x30ae
Subsystem vendor ID 0x103c

for more dl attachments... hope this help out

Sorry guys , been busy with AppleACPI Project , that is getting sleep to work and other power management stuff. This is going to be IMPOSSIBLE , let me say it

Firstly its mainly because Apple's OS does not support 'Shared Memory Architecture '. For example , HyperMemory. It only works with Intel's Standard stuff. So we need to get the root of OSX aka the Quartz stuff and rewrite it back to support. Apple is certainly not giving us the source

Secondly , the GPU uses the CPU to do many of OpenGL Calculations. (If you have noticed that is)

There are some chipsets that have dedicated memory beside the shared one, like the Radeon X1150 (my case) wich has 128 MB dedicated + 128 MB Shared...well we can live without the shared one, it would be even better, because many users prefer more system memory against shared VRAM.

is it dead?
i,ve heard about a linux driver release, could that be useful somehow?

Dome,
I hate to say it, but unfortunately not. Remember that the main problem is enabling Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Those are two very unique video rendering systems that OS X uses. Trust me if the Linux driver could have been ported it would have been done long ago. I finally gave up on my x200 laptop to go for one with a GMA950 built in. The main problem is that the memory architecture on the x200 is extremely unique and from my understanding there is no way to get OS X to address it properly.

Vista is translating all OpenGL actions to Direct3D. Is there any way how to program this for Mac OS?? OpenGL games / programs runs smoothly on Vista with x200M because of this...

What good would that do? We still need an accelerated driver in order to get any of this working. No acceleration = no joy. Period.

i stumbled across this a little late... me and my gateway notebook now sob But i still hae my intel chipped system running 10.4.7 better than the MB, so its all good...