It is possible that the card is DOA.

There may be a BIOS option for allocating resources to the PCI bus. It may also be incompatible with your chipset, but that would require more research.

Have you tested the card in another system?

Thanks for the reply Fitzpatr,

I thought the board may have been DOA, various utilities from the manufacturer weren't able to see the card's BIOS version. So I reached out to the seller, who sent me another for the cost of shipping, which was pretty generous I think. I just plugged it in this afternoon, and am seeing similar results.

The motherboard uses the SiS 85C496/497 1994 chipset, how would I go about verifying compatibility?

Within the Windows 98 device manager, the card shows up as functioning properly. However, because it installs a third-party tool, PowerDesk, that seems to perform an illegal operation every time I try to view my display properties, I can't actually enable the display... At least, not through a gui and I have no idea how to do this via other means since I'm pretty new to retro PC building and troubleshooting.

And sadly, I don't have another system with which to test the card(s) besides my Win10 machine, which I suspect I might run into trouble simply due to the age of the card compared to my modern system.

Edit: Also for reference, this was one of the threads I read prior to purchasing the card:
Fastest PCI graphics card in a 486
So I know the card can work on a 486 era machine...

Edit2:

So after poking around a bit more, the previously linked thread pointed to this thread which listed the Matrox Millennium G200 8/16MB card working under the SiS 496/497 chipset heading. So it looks like there's not a chipset incompatibility at least. 😒

It would be nice if I could pick Feipoa's brain on how they accomplished this, if they even still remember. .

He'll probably pop by eventually. I found the same thread, and I was able to find a couple of people who got a 486 and a G200 working. Have you tried clearing the BIOS? Have you tried all different PCI slots? What bus speed are you running?

Yeah, I've reset the BIOS. And then I somehow managed to track down some BIOS updates for the R418 over here: http://www.elhvb.com/supportbios.info/Archive … WARD/index.html

After applying the BIOS updates, the system no longer fails to boot with just the Matrox card installed. However, I'm still not getting any video out of the card during POST, DOS or Windows 98. But hey, that's some progress right? 😀

Next, I'm going to see if put my Trident ISA card back in and see if I can mess around with some settings in Windows 98 and see if I can make anything work. Installing the BIOS update did give me some new options in PCI settings, but I don't know if they're relevant to getting this card to work. They read as:

1CPU->PCI Mem Post Write Buf : Disable
2CPU->PCI Memory Burst Write : Disable
3PCI Master Burst Read/Write : Disable

superderek wrote:

[...]

And sadly, I don't have another system with which to test the card(s) besides my Win10 machine, which I suspect I might run into trouble simply due to the age of the card compared to my modern system.

If you're not even getting POST on your 486 with the card, you don't need to boot into OS. Just seeing POST on the other system would tell you whether the basics of the card are working. You can also easily test higher functionality using a Linux LiveUSB distro. So if the newer system has a PCI slot, you can use it to test this card.

Do you have any other PCI VGA cards you could test in the 486?

Well since updating my motherboard BIOS, the 486 computer does boot all the way up without errors, I just can't see it happen because the card doesn't output a video signal. I suppose the thread title no longer reflects my current problem, so I'll update it. Now the problem is my Matrox Millennium G200 isn't displaying anything.

I believe that my motherboard recognizes the PCI card as a display device now. I think so because with no display adapter installed, the motherboard beeps 4 times, But with just the Matrox card installed it boots all the way into Win98 without issue. So it would seem that now it's down to figuring out what's up with my Matrox card. And if that's the case, I think my topic would be better suited for the video forum, so I'll mark this topic solved.