VBIOS Bit Rot? Saving a Pair of Matrox AGP Cards

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Published on November 11, 2022 9:22:46 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWfLuFG9_D8

Duration: 7:38

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When not one but two of my recently purchased Matrox cards turned out to be dead, I discovered that there have been high failure rates reported for the G100 and G200 series cards over the years. They seem to be susceptible to vBIOS degradation (aka Bit Rot) over time leading to unusable cards. Today I’ll be doing some troubleshooting to get these two cards back in operation.

If you’ve got an old video card that just suddenly stopped working, you may want to give it a second look before tossing it into the e-waste bin.

The 3dfx Voodoo 3 Repairathon Video:
https://youtu.be/H2rIfqd_-rg

Useful Vogons thread including the recovery utility:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=72685

Internet Archive cache of the “MatroX Files”:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040110103309/http://grafi.ii.pw.edu.pl/gbm/matrox/


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00:00 Introduction
02:06 The Dual Card “Switcharoo”
03:13 G200 BIOS Recovery
05:05 G100 BIOS Recovery
06:13 Conclusion

The closing audio track is an original called “Prelude to Space” by Bertrand Guégan. You can find more of his work here: https://soundcloud.com/bertrandguegan