First post, by NickJ80
I have a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro in my Pentium 166 machine and I recently purchased a Creative PC-DVD hardware MPEG2 decoder card to use with it. The PC-DVD card uses the feature connector of the video card to pipe the video into the video card; the decoder card manual specifically mentions the S3 Virge/DX as being compatible. After connecting the decoder to the feature connector of the video card and installing into a PCI slot, Windows detects the card fine and installs the driver without a problem. The DVD playback software that comes with the card (which seems to be the only software compatible with the PC-DVD) can play back a DVD perfectly fine via the composite and s-video out on the decoder card, but the video window on the computer shows nothing, just black. It seems like the video card's video overlay never gets activated. On a possibly related note, if I don't disable GDI acceleration in the video driver, the Creative DVD player crashes when it tries to play back video. Below are my system details.
- Gateway 2000 OEM motherboard using the Intel 430FX chipset
- Pentium 166
- 64 MB RAM
- Windows 95B
- Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro (S3 Virge/DX) - Rev. B, 4 MB, no TV out, firmware 1.01, using the Diamond-branded drivers (GDI Acceleration disabled) version 4.10.01.0069 with the bundled InControl Tools 95 version 4.03.147
- Diamond Monster 3D (3dfx Voodoo 1)
- Creative PC-DVD - no driver version that I could find, but the date on the driver says 3-6-1998
- 3Com EtherLink 10/100 PCI TX NIC (3C905B-TX)
- Creative Sound Blaster 16 Plug and Play
- and of course an IDE hard drive and DVD drive
Has anyone been able to get the video overlay function of the Stealth 3D 2000 Pro to work? Is there anything special that I should have to do to make it function properly? Has anyone successfully used the Creative PC-DVD card before? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.