Ok gang,

If you didn't know, ATI released the full release Catylist 5.3(?) drivers yesterday for both XP 32 AND 64 bit.

Since there's no Omega version for the 64 bit XP yet, I had to hack the drivers to make them work on my M6809. Here's how you do it if you're trying to run them....

First, download and attempt to install the Catylist x64 edition package from ATI. It will fail with some "Missing .inf" from Thunk.exe. Don't worry about it. Just take note of which directory it creates for all the files.

Next, navigate to that directory, (should be C:\ATI\SUPPORT\wxp64-8-12-050317m-022144C\Driver\XP64A_INF) and open up the CA_22144.inf file.

In there scroll down until you see a list of different model cards. For the first 9600, change that line to read:

"RADEON 9600 Mobility" = ati2mtag_RV360, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4E50


Now, scroll down a bunch further until you see a section labeled:
[ati2mtag_RV360_SoftwareDeviceSettings]

(Make sure it's the one with RV, not just R, I screwed this up a few times until I realized there was an RV and THAT'S the one you need.)

In that section you'll see 3 lines with a whole bunch of numbers. Change the second line to read: (make sure it's all on 1 line, there's a space between the first % and the REG_BINARY that the posting system will word wrap on)

HKR,, DALNonStandardModesBCD2, %REG_BINARY%,12,80,07,20,00,00,00,75,12,80,07,20,00,00,00,85,12,80,07,68,00,00,00, 60,12,80,07,68,00,00,00,75,12,80,07,68,00,00,00,85,12,80,08,00,00,00,00,60,12,80,0 8,00,00,00,00,75,12,80,08,00,00,00,00,85

Save and close the file.

Next, go into My computer-->properties-->Hardware-->Device Manager-->Display Adaptor. Double click on the entry for the card. Driver Tab. Tell it to update driver. "Not at this time" then hit Next. Install from a specified Location. Don't search, you'll choose. Have Disk. Point the file browser to that .inf file you just edited.

Once you do that you should see a listing for "Radeon 9600 Mobility". Select it. Once it's done installing it'll ask to reboot. Do so. Once it does, you should be able to then do Display properties and set to 1280x800x32 bit.

And you're good to go!

Now, with that said, you're not going to have any of the sweet tools nor the PowerPlay feature that you get with the Omega Drivers, but this will at least get you up and running in the correct resolution for our laptops until the Omega Driver dude gets around to x64 support.

Enjoy!!!

(Thanks to the gang at PlanetAMD64 for pointing me in the right direction...)

--Mike

thanks

Moved to support ... redirect left in general and stuck ... thanks for the work!

Alright since we've found the way to get the final drivers working, I'm removing the beta drivers from my site. Thanks for the info cbr!

I had tried the Tech Connect Beta package, and discovered that my display was screwed up when running on battery (the display expanded the 1200x800 resolution so that it was actually larger than the physical size of the screen). Has anyone seen the same thing happen with the modified Catylysts? If so, what are the steps necessary to fix this issue?

I don't know if it will work on the new cats, but the solution on the Beta 3 drivers from tech connect was to simply turn PowerPlay! off in the advanced display properties.

I didn't have the problem at all with the ATI Drivers. However, Powerplay was turned off by default.

Emachines finally gave up on trying to repair my 6809 in Canada (40 miles away from me) and shipped me a "new refurbished" unit straight from Texas that arrived yesterday.

Got all excited with my XP64 Pro CD and installed away.

I downloaded the latest cat drivers as per the instruction but for some reason (due to me probably) I ended up with Radeon 9550 drivers installed.

Hoped it would still work but wouldn't give me 1280 X 800...I went ahead and ghosted it anyways for later.

I have re-installed plain XP and ghosted it also.

2 questions:

1) Any new xp ati drivers available?
2) Any easy way to dual boot with the ghost images.

thx.

FYI - this does not work with the new 5.5 drivers released this week.

followed the directions to a tee, worked for me on my new m6810 with ati 5.5 catalyst drivers, thanks alot

ATI has released the 5.6 drivers - trying them out now.

*EDIT*

Installed 5.6 without incident. Still have to run some benchmarks to see if it made a difference.

What advantage do you get from the new drivers?

Eunix

While I haven't run the benchmarks yet, I have noticed framerate improvements in WoW and HL2. Generally speaking, each successive release of videocard drivers provided some sort of improvement in performance. With the 5.6 set, ATI enabled WMV acceleration and made some tweaks to the automated settings system to improve performance. HardOCP has a good article detailing upcoming additions and improvements in the Catalyst 5.7 & 5.8 drivers. It is acessible from their home page:

http://www.hardocp.com