is it possible your Banshee is broken ?

Have you tried another AGP videocard ?

I had two Banshees that worked in 2D, but when switching to 3D the system froze. One of them could only set one resolution in 2D - 640x480. After replacing the 3dfx chips, the cards started working fine.

Interesting. I pulled the card and put it in a Windows XP system. The highest resolution I can get is 1024x768 at 32bit color. Anything higher and I get a black screen, or out of range error on my monitor. I never installed any drivers, but XP came up with the 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee driver when I plugged the card in.

I also cloned the 95 install to this test machine and experienced the same driver issues as on the CNC machine.

My ATI Radeon 9250 on the same XP machine and same monitor can do 1680x1050 32bit (native monitor resolution). The Banshee manual claims up to 1600x1200 resolution, so perhaps the card is dead? I've never seen a card failure like that before.

Actually, I redact the previous post. I just installed a fresh copy of Windows 2000 on my test machine and with the default 3Dfx Banshee drivers installed by Windows, I am getting a full 1600x1200 resolution with 32bit color.

Since there did not seem to be any official XP drivers for this card, I decided to try Win 2000 which worked, so it seems it was just an issue with the XP drivers. It seems I do not have any issues with hardware, just software issues with Windows 95.

canadaboy25 wrote on 2025-02-14, 17:52:

Actually, I redact the previous post. I just installed a fresh copy of Windows 2000 on my test machine and with the default 3Dfx Banshee drivers installed by Windows, I am getting a full 1600x1200 resolution with 32bit color.

Since there did not seem to be any official XP drivers for this card, I decided to try Win 2000 which worked, so it seems it was just an issue with the XP drivers. It seems I do not have any issues with hardware, just software issues with Windows 95.

AGP support arrived with Windows 95 OSR 2 (also denoted by the letters B or C after the version string). You have revision A, which is too old and does not support AGP.

leonardo wrote on 2025-02-14, 18:31:

AGP support arrived with Windows 95 OSR 2 (also denoted by the letters B or C after the version string). You have revision A, which is too old and does not support AGP.

This was my initial thought as well, but since Diamond's own user manual for the card has a section for installing the drivers on Windows 95A, I thought this was not the case.

However, looking through the manual some more, I found the attached snippet. So it seems the Windows 95A drivers were for the PCI version of the card only?

If I'd have to live with 95s I'd probably abandon the whole AGP thing and just toss a decent matrox pci card in there.

Since you have a backup of this anyway- have you considered trying to install windows 98? I am thinking your CNC software would work just fine on it

bertrammatrix wrote on 2025-02-14, 20:15:

If I'd have to live with 95s I'd probably abandon the whole AGP thing and just toss a decent matrox pci card in there.

Since you have a backup of this anyway- have you considered trying to install windows 98? I am thinking your CNC software would work just fine on it

Yes, clearly the AGP isn't going to work. It's not critical since it is just CNC control software. I just thought a little more resolution would be nice.

It is strange, the motherboard is an ASUS P3B-F which has onboard USB and an AGP slot, neither of which is supported by Windows 95A.

I have my doubts about Windows 98. The software was originally written for Windows 3.11, so I'm not sure how well the drivers would play with Windows 98. I suppose I could give it a try when I have some time.

Thanks for the responses.

How does the CNC interface with the PC? Windows 3.11 and 95 were quite different in terms of drivers, while 95 and 98 shared much more.

Does it have an ISA or PCI card it then connects to, or is it just using serial or parallel? If the later, it might be worth seeing if you can get the software working in a VM. Then a modern system could run it while passing through the communications ports.

SScorpio wrote on 2025-02-15, 00:38:

How does the CNC interface with the PC? Windows 3.11 and 95 were quite different in terms of drivers, while 95 and 98 shared much more.

Does it have an ISA or PCI card it then connects to, or is it just using serial or parallel? If the later, it might be worth seeing if you can get the software working in a VM. Then a modern system could run it while passing through the communications ports.

The CNC controller is a large ISA card. There is also a second ISA card which is a dual-ported RAM card that connects to the first card with ribbon cables and allows faster communication between the PC and the controller card.

How many more background processes does Windows 98 have compared to 95? The controller seems to be squeezing every last bit of performance out of the ISA bus, so I am wondering if Windows 95A was chosen due to its simplicity and possibly having less background tasks interfering with the CNC software? This is also the reason I have been hesitant about installing USB drivers on the system, as I don't want the USB stack running in the background to cause subtle control issues.

canadaboy25 wrote on 2025-02-15, 00:12:

Yes, clearly the AGP isn't going to work. It's not critical since it is just CNC control software. I just thought a little mor […]
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bertrammatrix wrote on 2025-02-14, 20:15:

If I'd have to live with 95s I'd probably abandon the whole AGP thing and just toss a decent matrox pci card in there.

Since you have a backup of this anyway- have you considered trying to install windows 98? I am thinking your CNC software would work just fine on it

Yes, clearly the AGP isn't going to work. It's not critical since it is just CNC control software. I just thought a little more resolution would be nice.

It is strange, the motherboard is an ASUS P3B-F which has onboard USB and an AGP slot, neither of which is supported by Windows 95A.

I have my doubts about Windows 98. The software was originally written for Windows 3.11, so I'm not sure how well the drivers would play with Windows 98. I suppose I could give it a try when I have some time.

Thanks for the responses.

I'm thinking the backup might have been an earlier one and someone along the way did a OSR2 upgrade on it which would allow AGP and USB, IIRC OSR2 B doesnt come with IE so it looks identical to OSR1 A