I can't find Win9x or WinNt (or Dos) drivers for this graphics card. In Win98 it shows in device manager as "Standard PCI Graphics Adaper (VGA)". It has been in a neighbors attic since late 1996.
download/file.php?mode=view&id=173733
The brand is Xionics (FCC ID L4D XIP1612 PCI) and it has some chips I have not seen on a Vision968 card before, like the 'Pixel Magic PM-2' and a Xilinx FPGA.
Select standard S3 driver and it should work. Unless the card is broken somehow - many Diamond PCI cards with S3 968 are.
Requests are also possible... /msg kixs
kixs wrote on 2023-09-14, 15:40:Select standard S3 driver and it should work. Unless the card is broken somehow - many Diamond PCI cards with S3 968 are.
Yeah, I've tried adding the PC_ID to diamond Stealth 64 VRAM inf drivers (and #9 drivers). It then detected the card but crashed after installing the drivers. I think it needs custom drivers for the chips on the board to work.
Indeed, that card is obviously more than just a graphics adapter - the Pixel Magic PM-2 chip supports video compression/decompression.
Żywotwór planetarny, jego gnijące błoto, jest świtem egzystencji, fazą wstępną, i wyłoni się z krwawych ciastomózgowych miedź miłująca...
My guess is the 2D part of the card (S3 968 chip) should work with standard S3 driver. Other features would need other drivers.
Requests are also possible... /msg kixs
These are regular S3 drivers, but might work for the S3 chip itself at least: https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/archive/ftp.dyu.edu … ndor/S3/928drv/
Read the 00-index.txt file for details
eddman wrote on 2023-09-14, 17:47:These are regular S3 drivers, but might work for the S3 chip itself at least: https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/archive/ftp.dyu.edu … ndor/S3/928drv/
Read the 00-index.txt file for details
I tried the W950109B.ZIP drivers. Same problem unfortunately. It crashes right after installing the driver. Tried on both Win95 and Win98se. At the moment real mode Dos works and vesa svga games.
I have never heard of the company who made this card and archive.org doesn't show any matches, so it looks like this may be a case of lost drivers.
Xionics.com on archive doesn't have any drivers. they appear to be a digital imaging company that was later bought by Oak Technology.
Heh, found this: https://web.archive.org/web/19970224054925/ht … iew-color.shtml
No software though.
I have since found out this S3 card/model was used in Apple Power Macintosh machines circa late 1995. So it looks like no windows drivers were made.
In that web archive link it mentions windows support. It was apparently a professional/workstation solution, so it was probably relatively rare.
I had a #9 VLB 968 in the Win3.1 and 95 days. It was mostly a Win3.1 product so the support was strongest there. Win95 shipped with a driver for it that is used generically and for several card models IIRC. I'm sure you would also find different versions included with DirectX 2/3 games and maybe something new with Win98. Win2K also supports it. It's possible these Microsoft drivers are not high performance implementations.
Video driver updates were fairly uncommon back then. It's a good thing that Microsoft went out of their way to support hardware. Things improved when 3D came in and the chip manufacturers started supporting their chips instead of relying on card manufacturers to do it.
