ATI Graphics Drivers

 

As Be expands hardware support for the BeOS, we will occasionally release drivers for hardware not supported by the current BeOS CD "package", in advance of its inclusion in a future package. This page describes ATI graphics card drivers. These drivers may not be completely tested and certified, but they work on our systems, and should work on yours.

These drivers were released on July 9, 1998.

 

Description


This page describes and offers for download experimental drivers for ATI graphics cards, based on the 3D Rage Pro chipset, including the following cards:

Other graphics cards or built-in graphics systems which use the same ATI chipset should also work.

IMPORTANT NOTE: There is no guarantee these drivers will work with your system. We've used them on ours, but they are still considered "experimental." Use at your own risk. See below for recovery details if the drivers should render your system unusable.

 

Who Can Use These Drivers


Anyone running the BeOS Release 3.1 or greater can download and install these drivers. However, they will only be useful and effective on systems using an ATI graphics card, or a graphics card based on the ATI 3D Rage Pro chipset. If you don't have such a card, don't bother.

This update is for the BeOS running on the Intel Architecture platform only (PowerPC drivers for ATI cards are included with Release 3.x).

 

Getting and Installing the Drivers


Downloading and installing the ATI graphics drivers is fairly simple. Please read the below instructions completely before beginning however, so that you are certain to follow the correct installation procedure.

The drivers consist of two files, which must be installed into the /home/config/add-ons/app_server/ directory.

  1. From your BeOS system, download the ATI drivers archive.

    The graphics drivers are contained in a zip archive, and can be downloaded from the following locations:

    Via HTTP: http://www.be.com/support/updates/r3/intel/ati_exp_drivers.zip
    Via FTP: ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/beos_updates/r3/intel/ati_exp_drivers.zip

  2. Decompress the ATI drivers archive.

    Depending on your various preferences, this may happen automatically. If not, just double-click the downloaded archive, and click the Expand button in Expander to decompress the archive.

  3. Move the graphics driver files to the /home/config/add-ons/app_server/ directory of your boot volume.

    The two graphics driver files are named ATI-GTB-PC and ATI-RagePC.

  4. Reboot your BeOS system.

    Your system should no longer use the grayscale SVGA graphics driver, and instead should boot and be usable in color.