Far and wide I have searched in vain for intel GMA900 drivers for Leopard. Until last week, when I found a thread on InsanelyMac, where user Andy4Life found a simple but effective way to enable support for GMA900 on Leopard.
I finally got Leopard up and running with full hardware acceleration on my trusty old Acer TravelMac 2423NWXMi. A few months ago, when I first installed Leopard, I was appaled by the lack of support for the GMA900, which means that I can't run applications that require Core Image and Quartz Extreme (that's like 50% of apps on the Mac), thus rendering it almost totally useless. Since I'm already limited by the CPU only doing SSE2, while SSE3 emulation isn't 100% perfect, having more apps rendered useless is a big no-no. That's why I've reverted to the old, trusted, aging Tiger, where I was only limited by the lack of SSE3.
Well, back to the topic. Andy's fix was to edit your drivers to include intel's GMA900 Vendor and Device ID (which is 8086-2592 in my case).
To make things short, you just have to open /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelGMA950.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleIntelGMA950 file with your favorite HEX Editor application, and replace all occurences of "86 80 A2 27" with "86 80 92 25". Once you've done that, delete the /System/Library/Extensions.mkext file, and restart. Done!
One thing to note is that there are some artifacts, but they are minor, and I can live with that.
Almost forgot to mention. If editing the AppleIntelGMA950.kext file wasn't enough, try replacing AppleIntelIntegratedFramebuffer.kext with the one attached it the forum thread mentioned above.
Monday 7 July 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment