Well I actually got it!
The problem seems to be that these lovely cards being sold in the US use PAL as their default video mode. Needless to say this doesn't work very well with our NTSC TVs. Here's how to change it.
First, grab
this program. Extract the files and place them on a bootable DOS floppy (I used the WinME disk XP makes for you). You'll need about 55KB free to hold the video card's ROM.
Now boot to the floppy and do these steps:
- Go to the directory where you placed the FLASHROM.EXE file.
- Run "FLASHROM -i" and see which adapter number your Radeon 7000 is. If it's the only PCI video card in the system it should be 0.
- Now run "FLASHROM -s 0 r7000.rom" (r7000.rom is just the filename you want to save the BIOS image as, keep it in 8.3 format)
- Finally, run "FLASHROM -p 0 r7000.rom tvstd NTSC" (0 is the number of the adapter, and again r7000.rom is the BIOS image)
- The program should now modify the BIOS image and then apply it to the card.
- Reboot and hook up the system to a TV set BEFORE turning it on. By having a TV plugged into the card on boot it tells the card to initialize and use the TV-out.
- It should now be using NTSC!
Do note however that by doing this you're probably voiding the warranty somehow and it's always possible something will go wrong and make the card not work. For this reason you might want to make a backup copy of the BIOS image before modifying it. Then if something does go wrong you might be able to reapply the original image and get the card working again.
I've done this twice with no problems.
You can also get a GUI version of the program
here. First use the FLASHROM program to get a copy of the BIOS, then open that BIOS file using this program. Here you can change many things in addition to the TV format, and you can even overclock the card if you want (I wouldn't do it, not with this card). The program only runs in Windows (maybe on Wine, but I haven't tried).
But, since all you want to do is change the TV format, I'd just do it all from DOS.
You'll have to let me know if this works for you.