VOGONS


First post, by FeedingDragon

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Below is a picture of what its doing. I was really looking for the most advanced AGP card that would still work fully in Windows 3.1, but I also want the my DOS games to work as well. As you can see, it looks like the picture was just shown in the top quarter of the screen in pieces. I'm hoping this is a known, and easily fixed, problem as the card seems to work great in all other respects.

S4Fail.jpg
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Feeding Dragon

Reply 1 of 16, by Errius

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I don't recognize this problem, but had another issue, where the card would show corruption on screen when it was stressed (3DMark etc.)

I fixed it by underclocking the GPU by about 15% using the S3Tweak utility.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 2 of 16, by derSammler

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My Savage4 Pro does something similar. VESA modes are fine until I quit from Windows. Then, I get the same result as in your picture, but also with pixels scrambled. Hardware or video BIOS bug I guess.

Reply 3 of 16, by The Serpent Rider

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Just change drivers. Some of them are absolute garbage for VESA.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 4 of 16, by FeedingDragon

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I'm not loading a driver. Not in a position to change the card's BIOS either. I did try loading several VESA patches, but none worked 🙁

Feeding Dragon

Reply 5 of 16, by derSammler

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The Serpent Rider wrote:

Just change drivers. Some of them are absolute garbage for VESA.

Not sure if that was directed to me or to FeedingDragon. Anyway, as for me, this happens in plain DOS when Windows was loaded before. No drivers there. 😉 When booting into DOS directly, VESA modes are fine.

Reply 6 of 16, by The Serpent Rider

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From my personal experience, some windows drivers will cause exactly that corruption in DOS mode.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 7 of 16, by FeedingDragon

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Only, that's booting directly to DOS 6.22 then going straight to the game. Been trying out different VESA patches (UniVBE doesn't recognize it as a supported chipset.) Keeps crashing during testing. My Riva TNT2 is also not recognized as a valid chipset (and it's actually in the supported list.) I'm guessing it's because its the M64 chipset. But, a 2 hour search shows that the M64 (as apposed to the 128,) is the only one people have for sale. I've heard such good things about the Savage chipset, that I sort of wanted to stick with that. I guess I'm going to need to switch to the TNT2 and try to figure out why I passed on it years ago. It gave me a problem somewhere, I just don't remember where now 🙁

Feeding Dragon

Reply 8 of 16, by Fusion

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My TNT2 Pro works great in DOS.

Pentium III @ 1.28Ghz - Intel SE440xBX-2 - 384MB PC100 - ATi Radeon DDR 64MB @ 200/186 - SB Live! 5.1 - Windows ME

Reply 10 of 16, by FeedingDragon

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The game in the picture is "Strip Poker Professional" by Artworx. The image is supposed to be a standard 640x480x8 image. At least, that's what the TNT2 produces at this point. But other games (Blood, and not the 3dfx version,) at 640x480 seem to run just fine. IIRC there were other games that had this issue, but I don't remember which ones (I have 100+ DOS games here.)

Feeding Dragon

Reply 11 of 16, by The Serpent Rider

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The game in the picture is "Strip Poker Professional"

I knew it was something lewd!

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 14 of 16, by Rawit

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FeedingDragon wrote:

Below is a picture of what its doing. I was really looking for the most advanced AGP card that would still work fully in Windows 3.1, but I also want the my DOS games to work as well. As you can see, it looks like the picture was just shown in the top quarter of the screen in pieces. I'm hoping this is a known, and easily fixed, problem as the card seems to work great in all other respects.

S4Fail.jpg

Finally got around trying this... exactly the same issue with my card through DFP out. I tried S3VBEFIX to see if that made a difference, but got a black screen instead.

YouTube

Reply 15 of 16, by FeedingDragon

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So, it seems to be the chipset and the card probably isn't bad. That's good to know. I've settled on a TNT2 M64 to replace the dead card. It seems to be working fine, haven't tested absolutely everything i have, of course, but haven't faced any problems yet.

Feeding Dragon

Reply 16 of 16, by Rawit

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Well it's still weird... The Savage4's 2D part seems to be based of the Trio line (looking at the hardware register docs and Windows 3.11 drivers) which should be highly compatible. And the game uses 640x480x256, not exactly exotic. So my first thought was that it has issues with the amount of memory on the card, I used S3VBEFIX to limit it to 1MB. But this just gives me a black screen.

YouTube