Have seen some duplicate devices in Device Manager before but never to that extreme. And that is a new install 🤣 ?

Hahaha yup, fresh install on a freshly formatted CF card... Well, technically speaking it's the SECOND install, but only because the first did the EXACT SAME THING. So something weird must be happening with my setup, I guess?

MOAR VGA!

You'd better open up the box and stop those damn cards from replicating!

If they were worth anything, I'd say sell the surplus 😀

Infinite money hack!

Wow, what a glitch 🤣

The least time consuming fix is to go to registry (preferably in safe mode) and delete them from there en masse. I am not totally sure where exactly the hardware entries are stored that device manager reflects. The non-invasive way is to just delete them one by one in device manager, preferably in safe mode too but that is gonna take forever.

Makes you wonder WTF happened here.
Pentium PCI motherboard so that eliminates IDE pin 28 CompactFlash BALE/CABLE SELECT glitches.

Right? Never seen anything quite like this, 🤣.. Well, I don't really wanna muck around with figuring out how to do it in the registry (and probably screw it up and wreck something), so I'm just gonna remove them all from the device manager.

One... At... A... Time xD

I guess it's time to watch one of the long Cathode Ray Dude videos while I work, 🤣. Fingers crossed that Windows doesn't decide it found nearly 200 "newly installed" cards when I reboot, hahaha

Uh-oh...

Like I was worrying, Windows sees about 200 new graphics cards when I reboot after removing them all.

-_-

Still holding out hope someone will have a suggestion for a more permanent solution... Or at the very least maybe some kind of explanation as to why this would happen.

EDIT: Just to note, it once again installed exactly 193 copies of the card, with only one flagged as working (obviously), same as before. So whatever the bug is, it appears to be CONSISTENT, which is something.

Do you have a different Trio64 vid card ? maybe there is something special+odd with that one..

Unfortunately I don't have any other graphics cards I could test, no.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-12-22, 10:35:

Makes you wonder WTF happened here.
Pentium PCI motherboard so that eliminates IDE pin 28 CompactFlash BALE/CABLE SELECT glitches.

Very curious what you mean about these IDE compactFlash BALE/CABLE SELECT glitches... What are those, and how would they relate if this wasn't a PCI board?

vga weirdness among other glitches Re: "Fixed" 386sx motherboard works but not with 16-bit VGA card

So it gets weirder, I reinstalled Windows from an image from a different source, same thing happened, 193 devices in the manager.

BUT!

This time, the first device is shown as working properly, then the rest are shown with exclamation marks, except for a bizarre pattern... After the hundredth device, every 12th device is disabled and X'd out, rather than with the exclamation.

Oh, and just for full clarity, the exclamation devices' statuses are down as "cannot find any free Input/Output Range (I/O) resources to use (Code 12)"

Early motherboards had often broken ACPI tables. You can try going to bios and looking for anything APCI/Plug&play related.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-12-23, 06:00:

Early motherboards had often broken ACPI tables. You can try going to bios and looking for anything APCI/Plug&play related.

broken ACPI is a good guess, you can install win98 with a command line switch to disable ACPI entirely IIRC

Plug&Play issues sounds plausible to me, especially because I tried installing Windows 95 on another CompactFlash card and got the EXACT same issue, 193 copies of the graphics card, 🤣... So it's not a Windows 98 thing, at least.

So alright, I can fiddle with the ACPI/Plug&Play stuff in the BIOS, but... I don't have a great understanding of it in general, so I don't really know what I should be doing in there, and what else I might need to do outside the BIOS (if anything) to get things working.
I don't suppose you know if any resources that might give a good explanation of how it works and how to fiddle with it?

Nope, just turn off anything sounding like its about ACPI/P&P and redetect hardware in windows.

Alright, I'm trying to mess with... What I think are all of the BIOS Plug & Play settings, as far as I can tell. However, I haven't had any luck with it, I'm hoping someone can help me look at this and figure out how it actually even WORKS, because the BIOS settings and documentation feel needlessly arcane to me.
So, based on the manual for my motherboard...

This is my understanding of how it works:

This BIOS page should be how I can manage Plug & Play vs. manual configuration for PCI devices. Each slot seems to be able to be set to A, B, C, D or AUTO, with AUTO being automatic Plug & Play configuration of the IRQ. The 4 actual IRQs that the system will use for each of the slots is configurable using the 1st/2nd/3rd/4th Available IRQ settings.
The way you actually manually map a slot to an IRQ is by assigning the A/B/C/D settings to each slot, which in turn has a specific per-slot IRQ mapping relative to each slot and the Available IRQ settings that have been assigned, and these ABCD-to-PCISlot mappings are shown in the table on the second image. This motherboard comes with a PCI slot IDE controller card that I'm using, and that's what the "PCI IDE IRQ Map to" settings correspond to: you either leave it on PCI-Auto to let the BIOS configure it automatically, or select a slot manually, or use the ISA setting if you have an ISA card you're using for IDE control. The "Primary/Secondary IDE INT#" settings are where you assign the A/B/C/D settings to determine the IRQ for each of the two IDE connections on the card.

I THINK that's how it all works, that's the only thing I can figure out, someone please correct me if I'm wrong. Moving on, using that understanding of things I tried to assign my IDE controller to slot 1 rather than auto (elsewhere in the manual it implies that that's the only slot it can function in, but that's neither here nor there), and then leave the Primary/Secondary to the default D/A, so consulting the table that means available IRQs 4&1, which map to IRQs 12 and 10 by default.
Then, because my graphics card is in slot 3, I try to assign it to setting D, which would correspond to Available IRQ 2, which maps to IRQ11. This way, everything should be on different IRQs and there should be no conflicts.

However, when I do that, nothing changes and Windows still finds all the duplicate cards.

Thoughts? Am I misunderstanding how this works? I've disabled everything I could find relating to ACPI in the BIOS, and nothing else seems related to Plug & Play