I'd check the switches on the back.

So the GD5422 card came in today. The difference between it and the Trident card is basically night and day... Windows is actually usable, and Doom is actually playable now. It may not be the fastest card out there, but it's good enough for me.

While on the subject of VGA cards, though, I also picked up a lot of random ISA cards... bid $1, won. It was mostly assorted sound cards, but there also turned out to be a Tseng ET3000BX, 8-bit VGA card in there. I'd never heard of a BX version, anyone know the story on that one?

Well, after doing some testing, I've run into a new problem...

Windows displays fine (currently running at 800x600x64k), and some EGA DOS games seem to work. But VGA DOS games all get graphical artifacts, mostly in the form of little vertical bars a few pixels tall, scattered around the screen. I also noticed in Speedsys, and a couple other things, some pixels in letters are a bit dim, and the graph lines look segmented rather than smooth as they should be. What might be going on with this thing?

Edit: Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. I tried a different card, one of the Tridents I got in my latest purchase lot of ISA cards, and the corruption isn't there with that one, but I do get a lot of flickering and other interference in all modes. I really don't get what's going on, why video is so troublesome on this machine...

Edit 2: The weirdness in Speedsys actually shows up in the internally-made screenshot, too. Interesting...

Well I could imagine that there might be a data transfer problem between DAC and graphics chip. Maybe its socketed so it is easier to check. Also take a look on the circuity on the PCB.
Another cause for random wrong pixels can be a overclocking of the Bus. f.e. one of my ET4000 cards show some scattered artificial pixels if I clock the ISA Bus above 13.3 MHz.

Also check the -5V and -12V lines of your PSU

Clean the ISA slot as well as the edge of the card.
Bend the card sideway during boot.

I've cleaned the card and the slot, and it seems to be making good contact. The card itself is in good physical condition, though I may re-do one of the solder joints on a ram chip... it's probably OK, but it doesn't look quite as clean as the rest of 'em. The GD5422 also has an internal DAC, rather than a separate chip.

I have been running the bus at 10mhz, but I backed it down to 8 and still got the same problem. 13mhz made no change either. Also tried the zero wait state jumper on and off. The PSU is a possibility, I'll try a different one that I know to work perfectly, see if that makes any difference...

One other thought, could it possibly be any of the tantalum filter capacitors on the motherboard? I know those sometimes blow up when they get old, but can they also fail without external signs?

Edit: I started plugging in various search terms in the Google newsgroup archives, and ran across this:

My friend bought one of those Cirrus 5422 boards but he had to return it because of problems. For one thing, it made his computer unstable so that it would lock-up intermittently. Another problem was that junk would show up on the screen--it seemed that some of the data being written to the screen would get messed up in normal VGA modes. We slowed down his AT bus and removed the 'turbo' jumper on the Cirrus board but the problem remained. We brought his computer to the store and tried two other Cirrus 5422 boards and although the computer didn't lock-up, the screen corruption was seen on the other 5422 boards as well. We tried a Cirrus 5420 board which worked fine, no screen corruption or other problems.

It sounds like a similar issue to what I'm seeing. There were some suggestions that it could be an old BIOS (which mine has), or a bad batch of RAM, but neither are easily changed, since BIOS upgrades aren't readily available anymore, and the RAM is soldered on my card.

I'd go with a mid-range Cirrus Logic card. My 486 uses a CLGD5420 and it does everything up to Duke3D (though it lags in places on that due to weak FPU) just fine. I don't know exactly what year this card was released, but I'd wager ~1993, and it won't be overkill like some of the suggested cards would be in light of the use of a 386.

So the troublesome GD5422 card has been returned, and I have a couple different cards on the way. I ended up getting an ATi Graphics Ultra... I haven't really heard any bad things about compatibility on those things, and 1024x768@256 is fine by me.

I also snagged a Boca Vortek, basically on impulse since it was super cheap. It supposedly has an IIT AGX chipset, which I remember hearing about (along with a whole benchmark cheating controversy) but never actually saw in person. Should make for an interesting thing to play with, at least.

So it seems ATI's drivers sucked just as much 17 years ago as they do now. I've tried several different versions from the Metropoli site and elsewhere, and I can't seem to get any of 'em working properly. Are there any other Mach8 owners on here that can give me any pointers (and maybe a known working set of files)?

Are we talking Windows 3.1 drivers? Did any of those work well? 😉 That OS was half of the problem though.

What's going on with your Mach8? The ATi Graphics Ultra was my first card, and I've used most of the drivers. I can't ever recall having issues though.

Yeah, it's under WFW 3.11.

I think the root of the problem is that none of the drivers are installing correctly. I used the loader.exe to set up the drivers, but maybe I'm missing something else... There's supposed to be some settings/tuning utilities, but none of that seems to get set up during the installation, and they don't do anything if I run 'em manually.

Also, text is really badly pixellated and colors on the titlebars have a crosshatch pattern unless I install the "Crystal Fonts" package... that package fixes that problem, but then I'm stuck with gigantic fonts, since I can't seem to switch 'em from 120dpi to 96dpi mode.

Edit: A better way to describe the text/color issue is that, the wallpaper shows fine with 256 colors, but Program Manager and all windows look almost like they're being dithered (poorly) to a lower color depth. This happened with all driver versions I tried, but upon installing the Crystal Fonts package, and switching the display mode to "1024x768 256 color Crystal" made the weirdness go away, just with really big text in everything.

Already tried with a clean/freshly installed Win3.11 installation?

Well, it was a fresh installation when I started... I may have to wipe it again, though, since it's got remnants of all the different failed attempts scatttered thither and yon.

There should be a utilities subdirectory in the ATI program group. You should be able to find something in there called "INSTALL" or "VINSTALL" which should allow you to change some card settings and adjust the picture on a CRT display.

I'm just curious, does your version of the mach8 driver include something called "Flexdesk"? That should allow you to control the resolution and font size from within windows. As for the "bad dithering", I'm pretty sure that isn't the fault of ATi, it's just how Windows 3.1 looks in 256 colours. If you are running an LCD screen, it will be much more obvious than on a CRT.

No, this absolutely is not an issue of 256 colors looking bad by nature... I know how 256 colors looks in Win3.1, and that's not what's happening here. The titlebars are a checkerboard pattern of dark and light blue, and text is damn near illegible. At least, until I install the Crystal fonts package, and then everything looks about how it should.

I'm not getting a program group, or any additional utilities installed... It's supposed to be installed, along with Flexdesk and some other things, but none of that actually shows up.

I think you're definitely going to need a new driver package. That just doesn't sound right at all. Too bad ATi no longer has their legacy hardware page. I'll take a look around and see what I can come up with. It shouldn't be too hard to get the drivers, as mach8 was a very popular card.

*edit*

Here, try this one:

http://files.chatnfiles.com/WinSitedotcom/win … .zip/index.html

It's a later version than the one you downloaded previously. I think it's just the windows component though. I'll see if I can find the DOS utility disk.

*edit*

This should be it:

http://members.driverguide.com/driver/detail. … ?driverid=64711

the zip file should be called "m8util.zip"

That first one you linked is actually the first one I tried. It seems to include everything needed, except the loader.exe itself, which I also have separately. I don't know why it didn't install correctly, maybe I'll just have to wipe the Windows install and try it again...

I'm not sure I understand what the DOS utilities are needed for, though...

The DOS utility allows you to select 8/16 bit BIOS, 8/16-bit bus, color/mono, monitor calibration, color tests and diagnostics. The monitor calibration was especially useful on older displays that didn't have digital control.