if i remember correctly i always had a via 4in1 entry for removal.. im not sure the one you have there is the right one;
quite frankly i think your windows went bonkers - id go back to a known good copy

I'll delete that one... either way there's that "trick" that has always worked so far...

basically by just installing Windows 98 OVER it,it replaces the WINDOWS directory, it even leaves all the drivers intact and doesn't ask me again for product key and other stuff... it basically "fixes" itself.

im not so sure about this; the asus drivers which were linked here before also work with windows98, so what we did should've worked imho;

Hmmm... then what went wrong ?

Either way, I don't mind starting "fresh" (I've already formatted over 10 times in just these 2 days...), after all there's no "important data", just a bunch of drivers and those 2-3 games that don't even run until we can get the graphics drivers to work properly 🤣

i have no idea;
hopefully s/o else can provide any better advice tomorrow;
after installing make a copy of the windows folder somewhere - from my experience thats the fastest backup you can have with windows 9x

Yeah... well, for tonight I'll just try the trick to install Windows 98 over it to see if at least I can boot normally and eventually tomorrow I'll start fresh once again.

And that's the last thing I do tonight because I'm also kinda tired (it's 23:30 here)

Let's see what happens...

Nope, didn't solve, still missing viagart.vxd.

Well... tomorrow I'll format for the "I lost the count" time and we start fresh, I'll also install Windows 98SE in English so it's easier for the screenshots and stuff 😉

Tried installing DirectX 9 yet? Also try to run your system with no more than 512MB RAM if you have more installed.

Edit: I did a little test myself with Tomb Raider III on a Mobility Radeon X700: With 1GB of RAM and MaxPhysPage set to 512MB the game will exit instantly (Windows 98SE refuses to boot without this setting with Catalyst installed). With 512MB physical RAM the game runs.

can you insert 1gb again, and load bs_ram9x.exe in autoexec to reduce the ram to 512mb for win9x?

i use this on a dualboot maschine with 1,5 GB ram..

512 only for win98
and 1,5 GB for XP.

Without do mechanical changes on the Ram setup.

Well... due to all the "screw ups" I did yesterday with all those experiments, now I need to format it and I'm doing it.

Once it's done installing Windows 98SE, I'll install the sound card drivers and the GPU drivers only and I'll try this RAM downgrade thing... but why are you saying it might be the RAM ? In the system resources it said I have 1k MB of ram, thus it detected it...

mrau wrote:

after installing make a copy of the windows folder somewhere - from my experience thats the fastest backup you can have with windows 9x

Yeah, this time I'm making a copy of it but without anything, just the fresh installation (which I didn't have before, of course).
I'm not sure how to "overwrite" it later if I mess up, but I'll figure out... maybe I'll burn it on a CD and copy-paste it in DOS mode.

I can't find that "bs_ram9x.exe" you said, Sammy.

EDIT: OH MY GOD I did NOTHING different than my last installation and now the Direct3D acceleration works and it shows the right memory amount !!!

I don't know exactly what triggered it to work, and I'm very interested in knowing it...

After lunch I'll try Tomb Raider III again, a weird thing is that it doesn't apply the 32bit color depth correctly: the wallpapers all look like 16bit color mode...

just google for bs_ram9x.zip or bs_ram9x.exe

these drivers support the x300 under win 9x if the ones your using dont work
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/archive/radeonaiw-98me

I have a x300 dell inspiron d610
running xp and tomb raider works fine

the latest via drivers i can find are from 2009
Download version 5.23A
http://download.viatech.com/DriverDownloadSubmitAjaxSvl

your chipset is VIA K8T890 / VIA VT8251 I dont see it listed

Yeah, just as I said earlier, after I reinstalled everything fresh, even the same way I've always done so far, magically it worked...

Now the hardware acceleration is there, Tomb Raider III works perfectly and so also other games like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Toyland Racing and TOCA Touring Car Championship which all of them didn't work yesterday.

Although there are still some concerns.

For example, everytime I launch DxDiag I get this message box:

Which means:

1The last time the software was used there might be verified access issues with DirectDraw. Ignore DirectDraw for this time ?

The interesting part is this, if I push "Yes", the DxDiag "display" tab is like yesterday... no allocated memory showing, hardware acceleration disabled... but if I click "No", I get this second message box:

Which means:

1Error: Error during the search of extra display informations. Code = 0x88760249 (Impossible to create a domain controller)

But the "display" tab in DxDiag shows 127 MB of allocated memory and hardware acceleration enabled...

I mean... without the error there's no hardware acceleration, but with this "error during the search of extra display informations" the hardware acceleration shows enabled ? WTF ?!

Yesterday I didn't get these 2 message boxes when opening DxDiag, it just... opened and was like I showed it then.

Any idea on what's going on ? I mean, the games now work, "yeee", but... what's happening ? Why is DxDiag acting like that, why are the colors of Windows always like 16bit and not true color like yesterday... why some games crash if I don't use software rendered ? YES... I tried "Heretic II", yesterday it worked PERFECTLY in software renderer, now it crashes even with it, even though I'd like to use "OpenGL".
If I enable "OpenGL" in it, I get some error which I can't recall at the moment....

About the colors, check this out personally... it says "32 bit", but it looks nothing like it used to look yesterday, the color depth was much better, it didn't look like that...

and it looks even worse with the sharpness of the monitor, which isn't noticeable from the capture card.

apparently you need
VIA K8T890 Hyperion Pro Driver Package v.5.24A
same page as before (sorry about the mistake)

Isn't the Hyperion driver the 4in1 ? I already installed the 4in1 before every other one this time.

Elia1995 wrote:

but why are you saying it might be the RAM ? In the system resources it said I have 1k MB of ram, thus it detected it...

It might detect it, but it will nonetheless encounter serious problems when it tries to use it.

I haven't heard of bs_ram9x before; it seems to have a dubious reputation. I would use HIMEMX with the /max switch instead. (Google will tell you more.)

ps: read this
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/264507

edit something just clicked with me,
your card support 2 monitors this is incredibly rare back in the windows 98 days and windows is treating your card like 2 cards
it tries to get the info of display 2 and because its not connected to a monitor its crapping out
either connect another monitor or connect your monitor to the other output
it could be your connected by display 2 and not display 1

But I have only 1 X300SE, is there some way to remove that "secondary" thing ?

Jorpho wrote:

I would use HIMEMX with the /max switch instead. (Google will tell you more.)

Or... I could just remove the second stick of RAM and avoid all the hassle 🤣

Judging from your other thread, your video card has two outputs, one of which is counted as a "secondary" adapter.

You can disable it in Device Manager, if I'm not mistaken.

yes but your x300se has 2 outputs thats why dxdiag has 2 tabs for display1 and display 2 (can you post screenshots of both)
to connect to the other output you may need either a vga to dvi adapter or a dvi to vga adapter
i'm not sure what output windows considers to be output 1