VOGONS


First post, by elcrys

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I was looking for some video card for a PCI only build, that will also have a digital output and I managed to get this one:

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What I was able to find, HP used to sell them as part of their workstations. As it's based on NV17 (GeForce4 MX 440 and similar) I was expecting flawless DOS compatibility. This is mostly true, except for VESA modes.

The card is reported as VBE 3.0 (as other MX cards I have), but in fact some features are not working correctly.

I detected first problem with Duke 3D in VESA mode - screen was flashing and everything was very slow. I was able to find some info about this and it appears to be the same problem:
NVIDIA Kepler/Maxwell/Pascal VESA Bios Bug (workaround found)

At least MSKVBEF7_2 patch from Falcosoft fixed the issue. Or I can use NOLFB patch for the same effect.

Second problem was Quake 1 - after selecting one of the VESA modes, game crashes with an error: "Unable to load VESA palette". For this I haven't found any fix. I was trying "vid_nopageflip 1" with no luck and Falcosoft's patch doesn't help either. Looks like this is a different problem altogether.

I was also trying some VESA tests and these are mostly failing (flickering or functions are not supported).

Is there someone who can confirm these issues for Quadro 200 NVS? 100 NVS and 400 NVS were mentioned a few times on this forum, but as far as I know, no problems with VESA were reported. There are even benchmarks in several games available for them from The Serpent Rider:
PCI Video cards benchmark: Electric Boogaloo Edition

280 NVS seems to have similar problems, but it uses a different GPU:
PCI GPU Benchmarks of 9200, 9200SE, NVS280, MX4000

Finally I tried vesa12 utility (no fix) and UniVBE (card not supported).

The last thing I can try is to flash BIOS from some MX card, but this could create more issues as this Quadro is PCI and uses DMS-59 output.