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Windows ME Multiple Display Support fails

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First post, by SamBushman

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I've been experimenting with a Magma 1-slot PCMCIA Cardbus-to-PCI enclosure. For my messing around, I acquired an old Sony Vaio PCG-FX170. When it arrived it had Windows XP Pro already installed on it. I got the Magma drivers all set up and installed an ATI Radeon 9250 PCI in the enclosure. Once all the hardware was up I noticed one of the 2 display devices were failing to start in Device Manager. No sweat, I continued forward anyway. Everything seemed to work. I got 3D acceleration for Max Payne and Morrowind. Neat!

To try and improve the laptop's performance, I removed the existing OS and did a clean install of Windows ME (the original OS this laptop would have shipped with). I also installed a batch of community aggregated official updates to get the OS as stable as possible. With that done, I installed the Magma drivers and ATI drivers as before. However I saw some subtly different behavior from my XP experience. The ATI card is displaying the message:

If you can read this message, Windows has successfully initialized this display adapter.
To use this adapter as part of your Windows desktop, open the Display option in the Control Panel and adjust the settings on the Settings tab.

Seems like a good sign....except any attempt to enable the display connected to the card just does nothing. I get a prompt from Windows confirming enabling the display, I click ok, and the Settings UI makes it appear that the display is enabled. However clicking ok in the settings window or closing it doesn't enable the display, and going back to display settings shows the display disabled again.

Furthermore, I noticed in Windows ME one of the 2 Radeon devices in Device Manager again failed to start. The Device Status says:

Multiple Display Support cannot start this device. The area of memory normally used by video is in use by another program or device.

That seems to explain why my display isn't enabling....but IDK how to further diagnose things. It also seems interesting to me that this hardware configuration seemed to work in XP just fine. Maybe the different display drivers handle the memory overlap differently?

Anyone have insight I could use to help further troubleshoot things?

Thanks!

Reply 1 of 2, by SamBushman

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As a quick update, I partitioned off part of my hard drive and installed Windows 2000 Professional (with SP4). The card IS able to run (just as it did in Windows XP). XP and Win2k are both using the same graphics and Magma drivers, so that could be part of it. I see one difference between Windows ME and Win2k: The graphics device that's failing to become available. In Windows ME, the Radeon 9250 device is unavailable and the Radeon 9250 Secondary device is up and running. For Win2k, the Secondary device is the one that has issues. it provides the following device status in Device Manager:

This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use (Code 12).
If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system.
Click Troubleshooter to start the troubleshooter for this device.

I wonder if this is a difference in how Windows handles multiple displays between NT-based OSs and 9x, or maybe something with ATI's drivers?

Reply 2 of 2, by Tiido

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I'm pretty sure the problem is due to Cardbus aspect. While Cardbus is essentially PCI over PCMCIA connector, it works "manually" and the controller chipset must be programmed right (by BIOS or drivers) to pass over all the needed regions for connected devices. This means It needs to be initialized well before video driver is, or video driver is not going to be able to talk to the needed hardware correctly since they assume direct PCI connection and not Cardbus. I am unsure if there's any solution to this.

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