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ATI Xpert 2000 Pro.

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First post, by FeedingDragon

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My S3 Savage 4 is severely letting me down 🙁 I've tried everything I can think of to fix it. Everything works (if I lower the AGP to X1 and the Aperture to 8 or 4 - tried 32 as its a 32 meg card - no go.) Except one game (well 8 games, but got fixes for 7 of them.) In that one game, all the graphics load at the top quarter of the screen on top of themselves. The other 7 games were fixed with the font fix, another TSR, but I could have lived with that.

So, off I go to find a replacement, and found one I can't beat the price of (free.) It's an ATI Xpert 2000 Pro. Great card, better benchmarks than the Savage 4, everything worked fine with my Rage Pro before (PCI and only 4 megs, it's gone now.) So everything seems to be looking up. Only there doesn't appear to be any Win3.1 drivers for the blasted thing. I'm getting mixed results on my web searches. Some places say, forget it, you're stuck with VGA or SVGA windows drivers (800x600x8 max.) Other's say a Rage Pro driver (found those for Win3 no problem,) will work fine, you just won't get a lot of the advanced features of the 128 Pro chipset.

Anyone have any experience with this?

Feeding Dragon

Reply 1 of 5, by idspispopd

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Xpert 2000 is based on Rage 128.
http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/ATI says "The Rage Pro is also the last chip to support ATI's CIF application programming interface. It is also ATI's last chip with Windows 3.1x support."
If you are looking for a video card with a broad range of supported operating systems I'd look for Matrox. Drivers for Windows 3.1x are available for Millennium G400 series, G200 series, Productiva G100, Millennium 2, Mystique 220, Mystique and Millennium (no G450/G550/Parhelia). All of these are also supported in Windows 9x.
nVidia Riva 128 works in 3.1x and 9x, no 3D in XP. TNT and TNT2 work in 3.1x, 9x and XP. For older DOS games nVidia cards have better compatibility than ATI or Matrox.

But you didn't specify what other operating systems and (older) DOS games you want to use.

Reply 3 of 5, by swaaye

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Voodoo3 has Win 3.1 drivers too and its signal quality is practically the same as G400's. It's probably the most useful 3D game card mentioned too.

Xpert 2000 is Rage 128 with a 64-bit memory bus, I believe. I had one years ago but memory is fuzzy. Never tried Win 3.1 with it unfortunately and have no idea if Rage Pro drivers will work....

Reply 4 of 5, by FeedingDragon

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Well, I can't beat the price of the xpert 2000 😀 I guess I'll just have to install it and see if the pro drivers will work or not. If not, I'm not out anything, I'll just have to buy a replacement. Usually the wrong drivers will just fail and not cause any actual damage. Had a line on a TNT2 for fairly good price ($9 with shipping,) and I know it has Win3.1 drivers. I'll keep the other cards in mind if I can get a good price on them. I'm not looking for anything really awesome in 3D card or RAM where this is concerned. I have dual V2 12M cards SLI'd together for 3D, and I'm really only wanting a 2D card that can handle 1366x768x32 (4.002M so a 8M card at least.) That's my monitor's native resolution, so that's what I set up in Win98. Win3.1 will probably be set to 1024x768 (I've never seen a driver that could handle 1366x768 in Win3.1 but I could be wrong.

Feeding Dragon

Reply 5 of 5, by keropi

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beware in case you want to use a Riva128 with win3.x ... the driver is horrible and ultra-beta , I've had hard locks and other weirdness when I was testing it...

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