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GMA 500 - DEVELOPERS NEEDED


mullany
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Guys, and gals; More and more shiny NetBooks are floating out onto the market, the highend are coming with Nvidia Ion or GMA4500, bu the lowend are shipping with the GMA500 GPU. This is pretty much down to the power consumption and ability to decode HDVideo.

 

Now, I moved from a MSI Wind U100 to an Acer Aspire 751h (Z520, 2GB, GMA500) - it has an 11.6" (1366x768) display, which I thought would be great for OS X, Now, I am no noob when it comes to hackintoshing, (I remember hacking the intel release of 10.4!) - but I had a certain faith in the community when it came to developing support to these products. But now, many months on, I find myself looking into forums and scratching my head looking for ANY movement on GMA500 development.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry, miffed or otherwise pissed, I'm simply commenting. There are plenty of capable machines out there that could be used to great effect, if only their graphics issues were addressed. Now, I could sit here and comment all day, but I have been doing my research - back in the day, when certain audio chipsets were unsupported, the OS X driver developers looked to linux to provide a leg up. If there was a linux river, then more likely that not, and OS X driver could be built.

 

Now, before you all poo poo this by pointing out that linux has no support for GMA500, I would like to direct you to some very new news from Mandriva. Their latest and greatest (which is still in RC) has support for moblin, and the GMA500 chipset. This is rather interesting when you consider that Intel have been lazy with the drivers for linux.

 

My thought is simple: many of us lack the skills required to hack together our own drivers or support - so I offer my hand in friendship and support to those of you willing to take the challenge. We now have a starting block, a toe on the stairs so to speak. I just hope this fantastic community can rally once more, and put together a driver for that last third of the NetBook market!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Im on the same cart. Got myself a MSI x320 for very cheap price of $389, which is suppose to be Macbook air killer, but cant run Mac os on it because of lack of drivers for GMA500. I think we should organize some kind of bounty for programmers to claim when they develop such driver for mac. And here is the link with drivers for Fedora, http://www.happyassassin.net/2009/08/10/in...compiz-support/

, might help. Im personally noob with all hackintoshing myself, and was thinking of having get my first laptop modified with osx86, but faced problem :D

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Same here. Got a Dell Mini 10 and was planning to put OSX86 on it... only to find out that GMA500 is not supported. Instead of putting OSX86, I was planning to put Linux on it. Some guys were able to install Linux and use the GMA500. (I'm talking about Ubuntu here). Currently, I'm searching for the sources of these linux drivers... and willing to lend a hand in the development of the driver.

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  • 1 month later...

There just may be one - The GMA500 is based off of the PowerVR SGX 535 core from Imagination technologies, and this is the same core used in the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3rd gen.

Possibly, just possibly, one can extract the drivers from the iPhone and tweak it to work on the GMA 500.

Technical info from Wikipedia:

 

Apple unidentified—SGX535 + VXD (Samsung manufactured), in the Apple iPhone 3GS and the Apple iPod Touch 3rd Gen (32GB/64GB)

 

Intel System Controller Hub US15/W/L—SGX535(Intel GMA500) + VXD370, in a heck of a lot of devices

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR#Series5_.28SGX.29

I'm assuming the VXD in the iPhone is the same thing as the VXD370 in the 500, which is a HD decoder.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...

Hi All,

 

I am willing to volunteer for any development for the GMA 500.

 

Count me in for anything! I own an Acer AO751H and got pretty much everything working except video. This particular model has 11.6" and this display looks awesome which makes it a good candidate for a Mac Netbook at an affordable price.

 

Subscribing to the thread!

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I have in my hands same graphic on ao751h and iPhone3gs

Can't accept iP3gs is showing same movies, graphics much better and even hd.

 

i tried rename this file You posted here to: AppleIntelGMA500.kext or replace with AppleIntelGMA950.kext using Kext Helper b7 and Kext Utility. all strange tricks of hoping user of gma500

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just replace/rename AppleIntelGMA950GLDriver inside AppleIntelGMA950GLDriver.bundle with IMGSGX535GLDriver from it's bundle place it i extensions and run kext utility...

 

I can HEAR it's something different. ao751h "cooler" is running almost all the time

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just replace/rename AppleIntelGMA950GLDriver inside AppleIntelGMA950GLDriver.bundle with IMGSGX535GLDriver from it's bundle place it i extensions and run kext utility...

 

I can HEAR it's something different. ao751h "cooler" is running almost all the time

 

Are you saying that the driver works properly when you do this?

 

Nick

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I just did it without much of research. I'm checking .divx, YouTube, .jpg and I have new experience regarding .jpg - now I can watch picture in Preview/slideshow - before I couldn't. I'm not a geek...

 

and strange feeling dock pops out animation looks better...

 

Dear riws

How did You manage to run 10.6.3 on Acer? Is is true that gma500 has some more support on 10.6.3?

 

Thanks

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Thank You

I'm too small for Developer. So You wrote there is no hope for gma500 hackintosh regarding 10.6.3

Do You see any path or way about gma500 driver? I just don't know much about it, did this thing with arm driver instinctively trying to run better graphic on ao751h. I don't know much about drivers - I'm annoyed with apple politics regarding mac os and soft. I started to kill their software limitations because I wanted to edit movies in FCP on iBookg3... And find solution in need. Now I feel this ao751 could be great hardware for editing or graphics.

 

Thank You for any advice

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