Version 1.0 by Martin Binczyk

Foreword:

This guide is entirely based on information from Guru3D.com forums. I decided to rewrite it here because It's easier to find for the DA people. A special thanks goes to the man that made it all possible, author of RivaTuner and SoftFireGL scripts - Alexey "Unwinder" Nicolaychuk


0. Things to remember

- You'll loose the ability to use a normal Catalyst control panel, there are no Direct3D controls in the FGL panel

- This will not give you any perfromance increase in games (it might even work slower). On the other hand if you are using professional CAD/CAM packages then you should see a significant increase in viewport rendering speed

1. Things you'll need

- A Radeon GFX card (should work with 9500 and up) working under Windows 2000, XP or 2003
- ATI FireGL 8.062 driver [link]
Why this one? Because it's tested and know to work with Riva Tuner 2.0 RC 15.4.
Later versions will not work with this version of SoftFireGL patch script
- RivaTuner 2.0 RC 15.4 [link]
- WinRAR (for unpacking the driver) </strong>[link]</strong>

2. Modifying the drivers.

Once you have the driver downloaded, unpack it somwhere (rightclick and select Extract Files...)

Install RivaTuner

Go to <directory where you installed RivaTuner>PatchScriptsATISoftFireGLUnified and run the SoftFireGL w2k.rts script.
- Select the FireGL card you want to mod the driver for (</strong>It has to be a workstation equivalent of your radeon!</strong>):

Radeon 9500 = FireGL Z1
Radeon 9600 = FireGL T2
Radeon 9700 = FireGL X1
Radeon 9800 = FireGL X2
Radeon 9800SE = FireGL X2 (4-pipeline mode)
Radeon X800 = FireGL X3

and click Continue.

- The script will prompt you for a location of ati2mtag.sys file, change the file type to ati2mtag.sy_ and browse to <location of your unpacked drivers>Driver2KXP_INFB_18414ati2mtag.sy_ (select the file and click Open).

A window will appear waring you that the file is not certified to work with this script, click OK and after a while you should see another window that says "Patch script has been successfully executed. Read log for details." (if there is something else here then the patch has failed and there is a VERY good chance that the mod will not work).

Now you need to manually modify the drivers .ini files with your cards device ID.

First you need to know what your cards PCI deviceID is. Launch RivaTuner, in the Main tab you should see a line like this:

"256-bit R350 (8x1) with 128MB DDR memory     Customize..."
(of course yours will be most likely different).

Click on the little button next to "Customize..." and select "Graphics subsystem diagnostic report" (4th icon from the right). Scroll down till you see "Display adapter information" and right under that there should be a line Device ID : xxxx. Copy that number (where xxxx are) or write it down somewhere.

Go to <location of your unpacked drivers>Driver2KXP_INF and open in Notepad:
->C2_18678.inf if you are on Windows 2000
->CX_18678.inf if you are on Windows XP/2003

You can modify both if you want.

Inside those files you should see a section [ATI.Mfg.NTx86] with adapters listed. Once again, remember for which card you are moding your drivers (in my case it was R9800 -> FireGL X2 mod) and modify ONLY the appropriate lines.

Find the firegl that you want to mod your radeon into and modify it's Device ID with your cards Device ID
In my case this was:

Original file:
(....)
"ATI FireGL X2 AGP Pro" = ati2mtag_R350GL, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_4E4B
"ATI FireGL X2 AGP Pro Secondary" = ati2mtag_R350GL, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_4E6B
(....)

Moded file :
(....)
"ATI FireGL X2 AGP Pro" = ati2mtag_R350GL, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_4E48
"ATI FireGL X2 AGP Pro Secondary" = ati2mtag_R350GL, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_4E68
(....)

Save the file

3. Installing modified drivers

Do not use the installer, instead update your drivers from the Device Manager.
Go to Start>Control Panel>System select Hardware tab and click on Device Manager.

Under Display Adapters select your Radeon card (or cards), right click and select Update Driver...

Select "Install from a list or specific location (Advanced)", click Next, select "Don't search. I will choose the driver to install.", click Next, select Have Disk... and point to one of the files you just modified in the directory where you unpacked your driver:
->C2_18678.inf if you are on Windows 2000
->CX_18678.inf if you are on Windows XP/2003

Click OK and the driver should install. If it complains about lack of driver certificates just click "Install anyway". Reboot the system.

4. FireGL control panel

Now that you have your drivers installed and working you can install the Control Panel that came with FGL drivers. There is no need to mod anything, just go to <the directory where you have your drivers unpacked>CPanel and run Setup.exe.

After installation reboot your system. If all went well you should have a working FireGL drivers and instead of catalyst panel a FireGL one, where you can select different application profiles.

Enjoy