Hacking ATI MMC 8.7 to work on 128PRO
 

UPDATE! -- Most of the file downloads have been moved here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...der-hacks.html -- guide still below.



Although the ATI All In Wonder 128 PRO card is not a "Radeon-class" graphics card, it was the first card to use the Theatre Rage capture chips, the ones still in use by ATI AIW cards of today. Because of this, it will run all Theatre-friendly ATI MMC software, including ATI MMC 8.7. For some dumb reason, ATI has forgotten it's old ATI AIW 128 PRO users. This guide makes up for their inadequacies.

This guide is being made for Windows XP and the ATI AIW 128 PRO using ATI MMC 8.7.

Before you begin, take notice!
- Some files you just download and wait until later steps.
- Some you install right away.
- Several of these steps will require reboot. You will be prompted by the software when that is necessary.

STEP 1. Download ATI MMC 8.7: http://www.digitalFAQ.com/downloads/...ati-mmc-87.rar
** Keep this file until told to use it.

STEP 2. Download ATI MMC 8.x support files: http://www.digitalFAQ.com/downloads/...1-dao-mdac.rar
** Keep this file until told to use it.

STEP 3. Download newest ATI AIW 128 PRO graphics drivers:
For Windows XP: http://www.digitalFAQ.com/downloads/...vers-winxp.zip
** Install this now.
NOTE: Note that ATI removed a lot of files after merging with AMD, so the links below may be dead.
The only file archived by digitalFAQ was the Windows XP version.
- For Windows 2000: http://mirror.ati.com/support/produc...2kdrivers.html
- For Windows 98/98SE/ME: http://mirror.ati.com/support/produc...medrivers.html

STEP 4. Download this exact version of the Theatre capture drivers: http://www.digitalFAQ.com/downloads/...68-drivers.rar
** Keep this file until told to use it.

STEP 5. Download the special "ati-mmc-128pro-hack.zip" file attached at the very bottom of this post.
** Keep this file until told to use it.

STEP 6. Update your Windows so that it runs DirectX v9.0a or higher. Any DirectX version 9 will work.
Download v9.0c from http://www.digitalFAQ.com/downloads/...msdirectx9.rar
** Install this now.

STEP 7. Be sure to install and download the Windows Media Player v9 and Windows Media Encoder v9. The WMP9 can be installed by doing another Windows Update.
Download from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...r/default.mspx
Or download from http://www.digitalFAQ.com/downloads/...media-enc9.rar
** Install this now.

STEP 8. Install the MDAC-DAO 8.x support file.

STEP 9. Unzip the ATI 128 HACK files. Put them in a folder on the C drive -- "C:\ATIHACK" is suggested so they are easy to find. There will only be two files.

STEP 10-A. This next step applies to Windows NT, 2000 and XP users only. If you are running Windows 98 or ME, refer to STEP 10-B. Find the "C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temp\" folder. USERNAME will be your name. If your computer logs you on as "JOHN", the the folder structure would be "C:\Documents and Settings\John\Local Settings\Temp\". Copy the two unzipped files from C:\ATIHACKS to this folder you just found.

STEP 10-B. This next step applies to Windows 98 and ME users only. If you are running Windows NT, 2000 or XP, refer to STEP 10-A. Find the C:\Windows\TEMP folder and copy the two unzipped files from C:\ATIHACKS to the Windows temp folder.

STEP 11. Run the FORCE87START.BAT file that is in the TEMP folder. You should see this screen:

Attachment 323

STEP 12. Install ATI MMC 8.7 ... this process should begin an actual install. If nothing happens, then try it 3-4 more times. It should catch. You will eventually see a DVD ERROR message, DO NOT HIT OK, this is good, and proceed to the next step.

Attachment 322

STEP 13. Now run the FORCE87DVD.BAT hack file you put into the Windows Temp folder. After this has been run, THEN you can OK the DVD error message. Continue ATI MMC install as needed.

STEP 14. If ATI MMC insists on a reboot, do NOT do it.

STEP 15. Now install the Theatre capture drivers, the file that ended with the numbers -6168v1.exe.

STEP 16. You should be done. This will have installed the ATI MMC 8.7 on the 128 PRO card that runs Theatre capture chips.

STEP 17. Finally, go into the "C:\Program Files\ATI Multimedia\main" folder and rename the file "TENSLIB1.DLL" to "TENSLIB1.OLD". This will remove the EAZYLOOK errors you would have otherwise gotten.

FINAL NOTE: I cannot guarantee this method, but I've seen it work several times. I've done it twice myself. I've never seen it fail. Be sure you followed the instructions to the letter.

Do you think its possible to install ATI MMC 9.02 on an AIW 128 Pro using the above instructions but of course substituting the mmc8.7 file with the mmc 9.x file?

Thanks
Eric

Maybe. It's been so long since I put this guide together, that I've forgotten some of the coding in the hacks (BAT files). I'm afraid it may be for 8.7 only.

There is honestly not much different between 8.7 and 9.0 (or even 9.1).

Greetings Lordsmurf,
I followed the above steps on a freshly built XP pro system with my AIW 128 pro..Everything worked as per your instructions but the TV does not appear in the ATI applet. I'm searching this forum and the rest of the web for the answer as I know many people have encounterd the missing TV function before. Thanks for any help you can provide

PS....No go on trying to install install ATI MMC 9.02

ATI applet?

Are you saying MMC will install... but without TV?
You may need to try a custom install.

Exactly...File player, video cd and audio cd all launch with no errors but the TV player is not a choice. I guess I'll have to play around with it unless you can tell me exactly what to do in a custom install. FYI..in device manager all the WDM components are "working" (no exclamation points). - DocFly

Retry STEP 4, specifically, reinstalling the 6168 drivers. These are the "magic" drivers.

Worst case scenario: Uninstall EVERYTHING ATI, and then start over. Redo the 17-step process listed here in the first post.

Well, I finally got 8.7 working (actually a while ago) with the TV functionallity. Had to manually update all the ATI WDM drivers to version 6.13..anyway I appreciate all your help but just found out that the recording doesn't work...screen just blinks when i hit the record button..Does same thing with a scheduled recording (tv does open up but does not start recording). Could not find answer on any forums..Any advise

Thanks
Eric

That sounds like a typical out-of-space problem. If the estimated filesize is larger than the hard drive space available, it'll either not record (button "grayed out"), or it will "blink away" when started. Go into the ONE TOUCH RECORDING settings and see where the files are going to be saved. If you need images, just ask.

Also, be sure you're really hitting the RECORD buttom (small video camera looking button), not the TIVO button or STILL IMAGE button (35mm camera looking button).

Finally, it may just be yet another bad driver install. The first time I did this hack, it took at least a dozen attempts. The drivers will just sometimes not take very well. Usually, I just tried to reintall the v6168 driver a couple of times until I saw it finally worked. I doubt this is the case this time, more likely one of the above two reasons, but possible and worth mentioning.

Good luck. Let me know how it goes.

Ok...go ahead and shoot me now because I'll be asking all the old re-hashed questions...can I use the above hacks on my ATI AIW 9800 Pro? I tried the 3 "Disable Macrovision Hacks" yesterday with no luck. I'm getting the green screen when I try to copy a VHS tape.
WXP
P4 2.54
1GB RAM
ATI AIW 9800 Pro
MMC 8.5

Thanks!

Well, the hacks on this page are for using ATI MMC on the ATI AIW 128PRO card. The 9800 needs no such hacks. It can natively run any version of ATI MMC 8 or 9.

See this too about MV/TBC/ATIhacks:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=112

Since my post of January 3 "No Sound Captured" received no responses, perhaps upgrading MMC as described in yoour post might help. Since I am using WIN98SE, Do I need to modify your instructions in any way.

Thanks,
Yargellham

I just answered the other post for you. Some ATI MMC 8.7 hacking info is there too. You should go read that post first, before this one...

Anyway, to be honest, I don't know. Try it. And let me know how it works. Most people these days are running Windows XP because of it's advanced abilities and friendliness towards video (things like NTFS 4GB+ file sizes are valuable).

The glaring differences would be this display driver: http://mirror.ati.com/support/produc...medrivers.html for 98/ME drivers, not XP

And then the biggest concern is the TEMP FILES directory where some of the hacking takes place. This should be addressed in step 10-B just fine:

"STEP 10-B. This next step applies to Windows 98 and ME users only. If you are running Windows NT, 2000 or XP, refer to STEP 10-A. Find the C:\Windows\TEMP folder and copy the two unzipped files from C:\ATIHACKS to the Windows temp folder. "

If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Your computer will not blow up. You can always just revert back to the older 7.2 if needed. But I seriously urge you to try for the far more advanced ATI MMC 8.7 version.

Thanks for the info. Are you saying that I should use rage128prowinmedrivers.html in step 3 instead of what you have in your original procedure?

yargellham

Yes. In fact, I just made edits to the master guide (first post on this page) to include other Windows version for STEP 3. I think everything you need is now laid out, all 17 steps.

Hi,
I realize that hacking the AIW 128 PRO to work with MMC 8.7 is getting pretty old, however for anyone having difficulty getting it to work with XP and are still interested I thought I'd post what FINALLY worked for me. I've done the hack for several people under WIN 98 SE with no problems at all but could never get it to work with XP, every time I would get a "MMC needs to close" error whenever I would launch the TV app. from the Launchpad. This occurred with both the Home and Pro versions. Anyway, this time I used the XP Microsoft Plug and Play driver that XP installs automatically and Voila!! it works. I have also noted that this driver is very stable with older vfW AVI applications like AVI_IO and pre 1.6 (DirectShow) versions of VirtualDub. The XP vfW wrapper does not like the latest ATI AIW 128 Display drivers at all! Anyway if anyone still cares at this point in time hope this helps. I've wasted far to much lifetime on this problem!!! GMaq

I just gave this old guide an update. :)
A lot of ATI file links were dead, so I've switched them to locally hosted installer files.

Where is the ati-mmc-128pro-hack.zip file?

Hi, thanks for reporting this. I've re-attached the zip file to the first post. Additionally, a copy has also been put into the ATI MMC downloads thread at http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/show...onder-392.html

And then for the curious, here are the contents of the zip file, in plain text format, in case anybody needs to create their own files:

force87dvd.bat
force87start.bat
I still suggest downloading the above file, just to be safe. Sometimes creating your own .bat doesn't always go as planned. (Sneaky txt editors sometimes add their own crap to your files.)

Hi folks,

As I'm working thru this procedure of hacking ATI MMC 8.7 to work on ATI AIW 128PRO, I'm getting myself confused on file names and source locations. Is it THIS file? Was it THAT one? Since I've been making myself notes on what I've been trying so far, I thought it might help someone else if I posted the notes. I figure that if my notes helped me, then maybe it'll help another newb.

Like for instance, there's reference made to "the Theater capture drivers" that were in a file with a name ending in "68-drivers.rar", which I didn't find in the thread with all the files. But there was a file called
"ATI-6168package-1st-wdm.rar"
that when un-rared contained a file called
"1ST tv-capture-wdm-6-13-10-6168v1.exe"
which when run says it'd install the
"tv-capture-wdm-6-13-10-6168v1.exe TV Tuner/Capture WDM Drivers"
for me. See? It's the WDM file is the capture file! As a newbie I just had trouble figuring which one was what. ;)

I bow down before the knowledge of Admin, and whatever small effort I can add, then while doing my work I stand on the shoulders of giants like him. (Which makes that bowing down thing VERY hard to do. ) :D

I haven't completed a 100% working software install yet, but I am fortunate to have hardware that has been proven to work in this application.

I'm going to intersperse my notes in the real, original, procedure, in BLUE

Well, I hope you've enjoyed my notes. The process of writing them down has really helped straighten things out in my mind. Maybe the notes'll help somebody else. If they're not helpful, it's A-OK with me if ya ignore them, haha!

I still haven't sussed out where:
ATI-6168package-2nd-wme.rar and:
ATI-6168package-3rd-cp.rar
from the thread with all the files but if they were important enough to put on the page, they might be good for something.

@Admin and others: additional guidance is gratefully accepted.
Again, folks, I'm just passing along some notes that have helped me. Maybe they'll help you!
Joe
(off to start installing now!)

NOTE: I've just typed in this whole treatise here. I'm going to take a few minutes' break and then come back to edit it for my inevitable mistakes. ;)

Edit 1: Oh yeah, the Hydravision player ATI-6168package-5th-hydra.part#.rar is for like multiheaded monitors, etc, so I'm not dealing with that one.

At least it's still here. :)

This thread is one of the earliest ones made on this forum, more than 7 years ago. (In fact, if you look at the URL, it is labeled as "1-hacking-ati-mmc.html" where 1 is the post number! Not sure how/why that happened. Maybe I made this post in Snitz before importing from the phpBB board that came before it?) Since that time, we've moved servers a few times, and upgrade the forum software to different platforms twice more. We did some "repair work" to the forum in 2009, to try and resolve a lot of discord in linking and hosted files, but it wasn't perfect. Thanks to your notes, however, I think we can get that first post cleaned up better.

What I can do is try to pull up a site backup from 2004 or 2005, and then match what's inside a zip/rar then to what's inside a zip/rar now. Just be warned that it will take a little bit of time, as this is basically an audit. Stay tuned!

That may be more effort that it's worth, Admin. :)

What I meant is: if there's only one person in the world that it matters to, then it's fer sher not worth you going to all that effort. Although I didn't notice that this thread was VERY old, I did notice that it was old. But since it had been updated since inception, I thought maybe there might be other folks it might benefit. That's why I was going to the effort to be so expansive on my blue comments. :)

But if it won't help anybody besides me, then don't worry about all that un-archiving. Between the CD, this post, and good ol' ingenuity, I'll get it all going.

As I mentioned in another post, I have it going now except for the audio being off-sync by some fixed amount (i.e. not cumulative effect due to clock skew).

It's all good!
J.

For AVI, MPEG-2, both? If AVI, which specific codecs were being used?
Are you following the ATI capture guides on this site? Be very sure not to deinterlace video.

I'd suggest MPEG-2 with ATI MMC, but AVI with VirtualDub. Sometimes, on some computers, some AVI codecs can lose sync in ATI MMC by a fixed or variable amount due to the soundcard hardware or drivers. For example, that was among the potential issues with early Audigy cards manufactured some 7+ years ago. Hardware is often to blame for audio sync problems, or the drivers that power them. It may also differ based on audio codec. For example, PCM WAV vs MP2.

Most appreciated it is, too! :)

Capture Computer #2 is up and running XP-SP2, and many thanks for that! It's a real comfort having hardware that is known working from a trustworthy source! (Unlike the HDD I tried and had to return, but that's another story for another time, haha!) I'm now installing the software to capture with the ATI AIW 128 Pro. It's been going well, but I've hit my first hitch. Let me explain what I've done up to the first hitch. Certainly it's been a looooong time ago since you did this particular install, but maybe you might see something wrong I did, or can point me in another direction.

Per your PM, I started out at: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...g-ati-mmc.html

Step 3 Looked for the specified http://www.digitalfaq.com/downloads/...vers-winxp.zip but that took me back to the same page from which I looked for a likely possibility and DLed and installed the following: ATI-128pro-drivers-1st-wxpw2k.rar then ATI-128pro-drivers-2nd-cp.part1.rar (which of course also uses and part 2)

Reboot

Step 6 DirectX9 http://www.digitalfaq.com/downloads/...msdirectx9.rar which redirects to: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...der-hacks.html which had the 5 part rar, installed it

reboot

Verified by using DXDIAG that 9.0C installed

reboot

Step 7 Wxx9 Window Media Player Opened Window Media Player and "About" tells me I have 9.00.00.3250
therefore I didn't install anything new (I can go back and do it, tho, if necessary)

Windows Media Encoder 9 DLed, unRARed: ATI-6168package-2nd-wme.rar and ran the file inside it: 2ND wme-radeon-7-88-030430m-008946c-efg.exe which comes up with an ATI logo interestingly enough, but which errors out with:

"Severe" error message:
followed by
At which point I paused to write this message.

Next thing I'm going to try is to get WME9 from another source. Bing search in MS website for "Windows Media Encoder 9" gives as the first hit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/e...e-3de948689db8 which refers to the product as: "Windows Media Video 9 VCM" and says, in part, "This Video Compression Manager (VCM) based version of the Windows Media Video 9 encoder/decoder will enable legacy encoding and editing applications to support the Windows Media Video 9 codec in file containers such as AVI."

So I'm going to install Microsoft's Media Video 9 VCM next, followed by: steps 8, 9, 10-A, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 17

Thanks for the add. :)

Sometimes it's good for others to see the how the cogs have turned in somebody's head, rather than simply reading instructions. This is a great example of how somebody should react to errors. It also shows just how many times computers must be rebooted when installing video hardware!

The error was pretty much stating that the graphics driver for the ATI 128 portion of the card had not been installed yet (as per Step 3). Based on other posts in the forum in recent days, at this point in time, I believe you figured it out and now have it working as needed. Excluding a dropped frames issue, that is. But that may simply be codec related, or possibly hardware related (the hard drive, or the drivers for the hard drive slipping into non-DMA mode). At any rate, we'll get that sorted in the other threads.

You've done well so far. :)

I have an ATI All-in-wonder Rage 128pro AGP that I've been trying to install on my XP system with the files listed in post 1. For the life of me I can't get past step 3 because I keep getting the following errors when running ATI-128pro-drivers-1st-wxpw2k.rar :

"INF error Video driver not found"
"Setup was unable to complete the installation. Try to setup your display adapter with a standard VGA driver before running setup"

I have my monitor connected to the built-in VGA controller for the time being. I've tried uninstalling the ATI driver, updating it, disabling it and every combination of those (with reboots after performing these operations). What am I doing wrong and what's the secret to getting this error to go away?

It's been so many years since I last did this, that I'm not even sure that I could do it again. I've not had a 128 card for at least 3-4 years now, having sold it long ago. It was an extra card.

Did you try any of the added advice put forth by Joekster?