Hmmm, try checking your PC bios. There should be an option to change video from Monochrome,CGA/VGA, etc. Make sure it's set to VGA.

I found this page that has some info: http://visualflex.net/gigagon/trident/trident.htm

Trident 9440 VLB UNION MADE IN CHINA […]
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Trident 9440 VLB UNION MADE IN CHINA

* TRIDENT MICROSYSTEMS INC. TWN7343 REV B
* This is a VESA bus card with 1 meg of dynamic memory, Panasonic MN41C4256SJ-08 chips) soldered in, and two empty sockets for standard 256x16 SOJ, for an additional 1Mb
* There are 4 jumpers. J7, 8 and 10 are screened:
J10:0:fast clk (currently closed)
J7:0:NI C:I (currently closed)
J8:C:+RAS (currently open)
J1 appears to connect one of the VESA bus pins to the video chip when closed.

Are you sure it's ISA and not VLB? I remember back in the day having issues with my VLB video card while overclocking so make sure that your not doing that.

It's set to VGA (or rather it must be since I can run all other 320x240 games with 256 colors).

And yes there are 2 empty sockets there...so that means it's 1 meg then?

And what's VLB? I never heard of that before. It's plugged into an ISA slot and there's a part of the card that goes beyond the length of the ISA slot and plugs into a second brown slot. Does that mean it's VLB?

Here's a picture I took when I first got it (sorry about the size). The card on the bottom is the video card. http://brandonblume.commerceculture.co.uk/486_inside.jpg

Actually it's not a very good picture as the ribbon cable on the right is covering the end of the card. But underneath the ribbon cable is where the other plug plugs into the brown slot.

And I don't think I'm overclocking anything....Everything's set normal in the BIOS.

And thanks very much for that information! Only thing is all the cards that are listed there are PCI cards and mine isn't. It does mention a VLB card so maybe that is what I have.

Yes, that is a VLB card. VLB (or Vesa Local Bus,) was an attempt to speed up video transfers before PCI. The extension (the brown slot behind the standard ISA slot,) gave faster (more direct,) access to video memory for the CPU. It became obsolete very quickly when PCI came out, as PCI was faster. It was also, if I remember correctly, extremely buggy. Since PCI came out so soon afterwords, there wasn't alot of development put into it. I remember having a VLB vidoe card myself for all of about 6 months. Never had any problems myself, but never really put it to the test either. Most of what I did at that time was either through Win3.1 or was EGA/CGA based (Ultima, Bard's Tale, etc...) I was still using my Amiga and C64 (beleive it or not,) for my game playing.

Eureka! I downloaded a "VESA.EXE" from that website with the information and when I run it all my SVGA games work flawlessly. Guess all I needed was a DOS driver. I got SQ6 and Warcraft 2 running fine so far 😀. Thanks!

Well, I've found a "Pentium-100Mhz" motherboard lying around so I replaced my 486 DX2/66 mother board with it. I'm now using a different video card.

Now I have a new problem. The video card I'm using is a Cirrus Logic 5434 PCI card. I found drivers that work fine for Win 3.1, but I can't seem to get anything to work properly under DOS. I'm always having errors. I've found some "DOS drivers" but none seem to help anything. I'm also attempting to use UNIVBE which detects it and claims that everything is setup for maximum capability, but when I try to run an SVGA game it won't run. The same problem I got when I was using with the VLB card on the DX2/66 but when I found drivers for it everything worked fine! Now, it seems, it doesn't work at all.

One of the drivers I downloaded was simply named 5434PCI.EXE. When I tried to run it it gave a bunch of error messages and then put a load of garbage on the screen forever with the PC Speaker screaming away and I had to reset the computer. Now it simply says: Memory allocation error, Cannot load COMMAND system halted (after running UNIVBE and then running 5434PCI.EXE).

It's really driving me nuts as I seem to have a slightly faster than DX2/66 computer and it works wonderfully, but the only problem is I can't get SVGA games working! And I know the card is capable of it. Maybe it's just no DOS compatible and only Win95+?

Strange. Both your SVGA cards should be well supported by UniVBE. Since you tried it on two different hardware platforms, a hardware fault seems unlikely.
Are you sure your copy of UniVBE is OK? SciTech has released the last versions as freeware, available for download on their Website.

Yes that's where I downloaded it from. That's the version that doesn't seem to work.

It might be that it is simply a native Win95 card and can't be used (properly) in DOS or Win 3.1 (although it works fine in Win 3.1). I may just have to go back to my old DX2/66, sadly..

Also make sure that your not using the latest UNIVBE, sometimes the older versions work better, like 5.3a

Any idea where I can find that?

All of the versions are available on SciTech's FTP server. The latest version didn't work for me - it seems it's missing a database of chipset information. The next older 6.x version works though.