HandOfFate wrote on 2020-06-21, 13:53:

I'm trying to get Windows 3.11 cooperate with a S3 Virge/DX PCI card. I have two of them, but both give the same result: a garbl […]
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I'm trying to get Windows 3.11 cooperate with a S3 Virge/DX PCI card. I have two of them, but both give the same result: a garbled screen after the Windows 3.11 logo disappears (which is, I guess, the moment the driver is initialized).

In the attachment you can see one example of the garbled screen, but what it shows exactly depends on what was shown before the crash. If I boot to Win 3.11 first in VGA mode, change the driver there and restart Windows I see the previous desktop (but garbled).

Actually, I've seen the same garbled screen as the person using the PCem emulator got with their virtual S3 card, which says something about the accuracy of the emulator I guess 😜 But the solution offered there to remove the "Universal Draw Handler" (which you can find at the Device driver config panel) unfortunately doesn't make a difference in my case.

The card works fine with the "Generic SVGA driver" that can be found on Vogons, and the VESA patched SVGA256.DRV in 1024x768 @ 256 colors. But it's too slow unfortunately.

I don't think the whole system crashes btw because it still responds to Ctrl-Alt-Del and numlock.

Things I tried so far:

* Device drivers from different sources (including VogonsDrivers) even though they all seemed to be the same version
* Trying different resolution and color combinations
* Switching driver settings on and off in SYSTEM.INI
* Tried different BIOS options
* Put in a ATi Mach64 which worked without issue at higher resolutions and colors (but I would prefer the S3 in this system)

Specs: AMD 5x86 133MHz, Asus 486SP3 motherboard, 64MB FPM RAM, S3 Virge/DX PCI 4MB (and 2MB)

The ini files provided with the 3.1 driver on mention the original Virge (325), not the Virge/DX (375) or others . Are those drivers really compatible with csrds other than the first Virge (325) ?

Good question, some websites with the driver mention the DX explicitly, but maybe that was never confirmed and people just copied each other.

Well, I fixed it. During yet another search I came across this website that had a newer driver than all other sites (v1.05.09 vs v1.05.05) and this one works!

However, my first attempt at 640x480 @ 256 colors did not succeed. I don't know why but I installed the driver as I did before, from Windows itself, and got a garbled screen again. The next attempt was to follow the steps from the readme file and install them from the command line Windows 3.11 SETUP program.

I don't know if that made the difference but I'm looking at 1024x768 @ 16.7M colors now, and it's much faster than the patched SVGA256.DRV.

I will try and upload the v1.05.09 driver to VogonsDrivers, in case anyone else faces the same issue 😀