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Dual video cards & Win98: avoiding "driver hell"

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First post, by xjas

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I'd like to swap my PCI Rage LT Pro into my K6-2 machine, which already has an AGP Voodoo3, essentially combining these two systems and saving me a bunch of floor space.

I know you can switch whether it uses the PCI or AGP card in the BIOS, so that's not an issue. What I'm wondering about is how to best set this up in Win98? This thing is already finicky with drivers and I spent a LONG time tweaking the ALI AGP settings to get an optimized and stable configuration.

If at all possible, I'd like to avoid having to go through the "found new hardware wizard" -> install -> BSOD -> reboot -> etc. gauntlet every time I switch GPUs. To further complicate things, there's a PowerVR card (Matrox M3D) installed in there too, which I'd like to keep, but it's not a "display adapter" so I'm hoping it won't cause any trouble.

Can I just install the drivers for both cards permanently and let Windows figure out which to use when it boots up? Is it smart enough to do that?

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Reply 1 of 4, by STX

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Well, you have Win98SE instead of the first edition, so that's a factor in your favor.

Here's my recommendation:

  1. Clone the hard drive.
  2. Install the PCI Rage LT Pro graphics adapter.
  3. Boot the PC from the cloned hard drive.
  4. Install the driver.
  5. Observe what happens.
  6. If bad things happen, then remove the PCI graphics adapter, replace the cloned hard drive with the original hard drive, and be done with that experiment.

Further reading:

  • Q179602 How to Enable Multiple Display Support Using Windows 98
  • Q182708 Hardware Requirements for Multiple Display Support in Windows 98
Last edited by STX on 2019-10-05, 03:12. Edited 3 times in total.

Reply 2 of 4, by mothergoose729

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I have a voodoo 3 pci and a Quadro FX. On my system, I installed the voodoo drivers and then the nvidia drivers and I haven't had any serious issues. The only thing I have noticed is that I can't change the resolution of the display on my voodoo. So I made sure to dial in my voodoo settings before I installed the nvidia drivers.

Reply 3 of 4, by STX

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mothergoose729 wrote:

...The only thing I have noticed is that I can't change the resolution of the display on my voodoo....

Have you tried setting the Voodoo's resolution using MultiRes? See the "Applying display settings to multiple monitors" example.

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