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Looking for working win98 VGA driver for AcerNote 350E (C&T 65540/5?)

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First post, by georgel

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Hi. I am using successfully this laptop (which otherwise is disliked for vintage gaming due to low quality DSTN display) with my old LPT chip programmer but win98 defaults to no video driver. This is not critical for the single application this laptop is dedicated, but I still prefer to find a driver solution if any of you has experience with this laptop. I made a clean install of win98 and still the display controller is not shown in the device manager (the display adapter is absolutely missing from the list). The POST messages suggest it is using C&T 65540/545) . Win98 claims to have default drivers for this chipset but they fail to load. The win95 I tried from similar but not exact laptop model I had found here on vogons did not work (on win98?). I may consider downgrading to win95, but since I saved the laptop from scrapping I have no original drivers that came with it. The original HDD was "knocking" and completely dead.

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Reply 1 of 4, by rmay635703

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People yammer on about these but I’ve never seen a 98 video driver for mid 90’s C&T. Considering the C&T are basically a large family you might start trying drivers for other more popular laptops (windows 95) and see if magic happens

Drivers for Acer AcerNote Light 350P

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads%2Fn … tium.1212991%2F

https://web.archive.org/web/19970121183231/ht … VER/DISPLAY.HTM

Can't use Hi-Color mode on a C&T SVGA accelerator

https://m.facebook.com/groups/503277420168121 … 59142837914901/

https://resources.winsystems.com/product-manu … cm-fpvga-pm.pdf

If you can get the VESA extensions working maybe you could use the generic universal VESA driver someone made?

Reply 2 of 4, by georgel

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From the links above I found interesting and tried proposed 16M RAM limitation by eating 4M XMS (total laptop RAM is 20M since I upgraded it during restoration), but that didn't help. For some reason win98 insists the problem is with the "primary" display adapter which does not show in device manager.

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Reply 3 of 4, by swaaye

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Have you tried Windows 95? I would run 95 on any notebook older than a Pentium II.

DirectX 3-5 included display drivers. They were sometimes problematic but they are another possibility.
https://falconfly.vogonswiki.com/directx.html

For example, DirectX 5 includes
PCI\VEN_102C&DEV_00D8.DeviceDesc="Chips & Technologies 65545 PCI"
PCI\VEN_102C&DEV_00B8.DeviceDesc="Chips & Technologies 64310 PCI"
PCI\VEN_102C&DEV_00DC.DeviceDesc="Chips & Technologies 65548 PCI"
PCI\VEN_102C&DEV_00E0.DeviceDesc="Chips & Technologies 65550 PCI"
PCI\VEN_102C&DEV_00E4.DeviceDesc="Chips & Technologies 65554 PCI"

Reply 4 of 4, by georgel

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I even tried SciTech Display Doctor under win98 and it recognized the VGA, showed testing modes perfectly, but once it was to work as a driver the ghost "primary adapter" that was not seen in the Device manager prevented it like the previous drivers I tried to operate. Then I installed Win95 and that resolved the VGA issue, the default win95 drivers worked properly with C&T 65540 card (including the 20M RAM). As a side note this is an ISA only computer without PCI, don't know why win98 drivers assumed C&T on PCI bus.

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