Mhm... Never tried such a setup, but I'll bet that if you install win98 only with PCI graphics inside (ISA video removed physically) and plug in the ISA card afterwards, it should use the PCI as a main card and almost completely ignore the ISA card.

DOS is a different issue however. Maybe there is some switch in BIOS which allows you to select the 'first initiated card' and set it to ISA. If not, you can select the BIOS option "plug and play OS installed" which will (hopefully) force the system not to initialize PCI cards and use ISA video instead.

Too bad you dont use an AGP card - I know for sure that you can force-set PCI/ISA as main video instead of AGP (Option is "initialize first: AGP/PCI").

Good luck and let us know how it went 😀

if i boot from my old dos and win3.1 hard drive it outputs to isa card (with pci card installed too!). i know pci card are working cos i have voodoo 2 installed and i use that as the pass through! 😉 i will try your above though when i get round to setting up win98! 😀

ISA VGA cards always take precedence over PCI/AGP cards for being chosen as the primary VGA by the BIOS.

CU_AMiGA wrote:

I plan on using DOS and Win3.1 using the ISA card due to the 3DO Blaster needing an ISA only graphics card and then using the PCI card with Win 98 (along with Voodoo 3D).

Are you sure about the 3DO Blaster needing an ISA card to work? Sources on the net only mention a feature connector, which should be available on most early PCI video cards.

yeah already tried it with the pci card. screen just goes blank!

so it is not possible to have both isa and pci cards at the same time and output thru pci card?

It is possible, if the ISA graphics card is not VGA.

You should be able to use both cards as you described in the first post. Configuring it in win98 can be a bit tricky though. You might have to remove the ISA card, install the drivers for the PCI card and then reinstall the ISA card and configure the display in win98 or something like that.

Could you not just disable the ISA card in device manager in Win98? forcing it to use the PCI card?

Sorry if that’s a stupid suggestion I'm 1/2 asleep 😵

chinny22 wrote:

Could you not just disable the ISA card in device manager in Win98? forcing it to use the PCI card?

Sorry if that’s a stupid suggestion I'm 1/2 asleep 😵

I'm guessing that both cards will try and load their VGA BIOS at the same location in memory though, that and the same interrupts for both cards.

PCI + PCI, PCI + AGP, PCI + PCIe should all work though as they basically auto-configure themselves, ISA won't. I've done that many a time. I ran a Millenium 2 (PCI) and TNT2 (AGP) for several years for dual-head display (the Millenium 2 specifically because it supported sync-on-green which let me use a huge SGI trinitron screen).

I wonder if removing the VGA Bios would allow it to work?
If it does you could rig up some horrible switching mechanism to select which card you'd like to use.

😜

Tried it with M919 Rev 3.4. It prioritizes PCI video over ISA video, and if you do plug in a monitor to the ISA video, it won't show. You'll get the usual BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP and it'll continue to boot, albeit no video.

interesting... the pci card i have got is the Diamond MultiMedia S3 ViRGE/DX Stealth 3D 2000 Pro, and the isa card is a ATI Mach64. maybe i ll retry the pci card in win98se again...

Not to derail, but this thread reminded me of the prototype Micron "Madison" (dual Micron Samurai-DDR chipset) motherboard which had dual AGP.

http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/article/20 … 131/pform04.htm

😀