By computer chip, I actually more specifically mean a video card. I wanted to hack a video card (One that I don’t use right now) and see if I can view it’s internal code. The video Card I have is an ATI PowerColor RADEON X700 Graphics Card. What additional hardware would I need to hack it. Would this way of hacking work with other PCI Cards or other Graphics Cards? Is there even any software actually on the card itself?
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July 30th, 2009 at 8:07 am
Video cards usually have a custom version of a BIOS. I don’t know that there is a program which will let you do anything more than test the device to see if it has things like Hardware T&L, what version of DirectX it supports, etc. Devices like that are designed for one way communication. You can send info to them, but they generally don’t send anything back that is beyond simple troubleshooting info and possibly some information on things like the availability of resources.
Most of the “internal code” is not like a processor’s code. A processor is mostly an empty box but a lot of how video cards achieve such high processing speeds is that very little of them is strictly software. Most of the card’s behavior is dictated mainly by its circuitry.
You could look into building some sort of programmable multi-probe USB oscilliscope that can send data to pins on the card and then read what goes through the pins on the processor. The problem is that the clock speed of the video card is probably going to be way faster than your USB connection so you may have to buffer the data coming out and possibly going in and do your studies in bursts so that the processor doesn’t out run your computer’s ability to keep up. If your video card supports overclocking, you could massively underclock it and that might get you to were you can analyze it in realtime.
You would also need a program that can send commands to the oscilliscope/bridge and translate the binary coming off the processor into something more meaningful.
The more I think about this, the more wickedly impractical it sounds. Why do you want to examine the guts of your video card anyway? It’s not like you have a lot of options for enhancing it anyway.