First post, by konc
- Rank
- l33t
Hi all,
First let me make clear that I’m not expecting a direct solution for this since I believe I have, more or less, covered the basic troubleshooting. Of course there’s always a chance that I completely overlooked something important, so please feel free to shoot in the dark. I’m mostly looking for ideas and more things to try.
The problem: A P1 MMX on an Intel 430VX (Triton II) functioning for more than 5 years as my pure DOS 6.22 PC, with no problems or glitches whatsoever during this period. Until I added a Voodoo1, a known-good V1 pulled from another PC of mine.
The card is detected:
But nothing, nothing at all using the card works. Every single thing, be it many games, demos, even the SDK tests, all result in a cyan screen and the PC completely frozen. Again, it’s pure DOS 6.22.
Things I’ve tried so far, extensively as you will see and often on more than one PC:
-Is the card bad? Something happened to it during the transfer? Nope, I tried a second one (from a different manufacturer) as well.
-Could it be that, by some unfortunate coincidence, both cards have gone bad? Nope, they both work on 2 other PCs flawlessly.
-OK, so maybe it’s a software issue. I move the hard drive from the problematic PC to the 2 others and try the cards again. Guess what, they do function. So there’s nothing wrong with my .OVL used for example, the things I’m trying to run or any other software (albeit there’s not much to blame, standard DOS 6.22 & no weird TSRs, a clean boot holding SHIFT down didn’t help either)
-Maybe for some reason they don’t cooperate with the onboard S3 Trio 64V+ (already starting with the unlikely scenarios…) 2 different standalone cards later, same cyan screen in everything.
-Removed all other cards, unplugged all other devices (CDROM, floppy) and tried all PCI slots.
-Played with BIOS settings by trying the IRQs in auto, manual, reset settings to default.
-Disabled every possible device in BIOS (COMs, LPT, floppy, USB…)
-Upgraded the BIOS and re-tried configurations.
-Tried a different PSU, nothing changed. Put the PSU of the problematic PC in another, as expected cards work with it.
-Tried a different monitor, even though I was testing the card on other PCs using the same one, but at this point…
-In despair I also tried different SIMMs and pass-through cable, not to leave anything unchanged.
-And finally the best of all: I tried 2 different Voodoo2 cards on the PC in question. Yeah, like you probably imagined they work perfectly well.
And here I am pulling my hair and hoping for more ideas 😕 Has anyone ever encountered something similar? I’m starting to believe that this is one of the few real incompatibility cases.
Sorry for the length of this post, I wanted to give a complete report on how I attempted myself to troubleshoot this and save people from writing things already tried.