Thanks in advance to anyone who reads about my proceeding predicament and an even bigger thanks to anyone who can assist.

As you’ve figured from the title, we are dealing with an address conflict. The plot thickens as it always does, I thought the conflict was just with one graphics card (ATI Mach 32) but I’ve since found the other card (ELSA Winner) which I ended up using because of the ATI conflict also has a conflict of its own.

Keeping things simple, I’ll stick with the ATI for now in step by step guide of what I’ve done so far and cover the ELSA card after the ATI.

Step 1

Installed the card and uploaded the latest drivers which came with NT. After a reboot I got the expected change in display resolution and colour. Visually no more default VGA.

Step 2

Within Windows NT 3.1 event viewer I came across a conflict in both ‘ati.sys’ and ‘qv.sys’, which I figured was Compaq’s onboard Qvision. So I disabled ‘qv.sys’ in the device manager, logical enough I thought, checking also the jumper setting for onboard VGA is set to disable.

Step 3

After rebooting the system and logging back on I find the ‘qv.sys’ conflict is gone (yay!) but ‘ati.sys’ is replaced with this: -

“LFB Aperture conflict, disabling aperture”.

… and does not say what the conflict is with!

Step 4

From here I booted into the configuration settings (Compaq’s bios) and go to the aperture section of ATI’s settings. I see these: -

The only thing I can change is the memory address; default is 84M and goes up and down in increments of 4 from 0 to 124M. I have only tried a couple but it takes ages going through the configurations settings every change – 20-30 mins configuring / loading bios / waiting per change!

Step 5

After the aperture settings I went into the graphics engine tab which has a series of unchangeable port addresses: -

Additionally there are DIP switches 1 to 8 on the card, though after a bit of research I don’t think they are to be useful in this situation…

There is very little documentation out there on early ATI hardware… but I did manage to find an EISA config file (.CFG) online which has within it’s text what I think are the DIP switch functions: -

http://tomas.dscloud.me/eisa/!ati4402.cfg

COMMENTS = "Switch 8 disables the VGA.
Switch 7 disables the onboard ROM.
Switches 6-1 provide address bits 17-12
for the ROM decode when VGA is disabled."

In troubleshooting, I have also removed the Adaptec SCSI controller and all other non-essential hardware which has made no difference.

Is there anything obvious to somebody that I have maybe missed and not yet tried? or any suggestions on the aperture addressing in the configuration settings?

Note; - With the ELSA card, the conflict is given on COM4 on i/o address 0x2E8… there does not even seem to be anything using COM4. I think this is a different conflict altogether from the ATI. Below are pictures taken from the setup software; -

Thanks again