nicolas1400 wrote on 2021-01-31, 01:23:

Hi, […]
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Hi,

This is my first post in Vogons although I've been reading the forum for quite a long time.
I'm building a Pentium 4 + WIN98SE + 3DFX pc with a few parts I have laying around at home.

My motherboard of choice is an ASUS P4s8X-MX (478 socket, SIS 661GX Northbridge, SIS 964 Southbridge), running a P4@1,8 and 512MB DDR1 ram.
My voodoo card is a Diamond Monster Voodoo2 12mb (planning to go SLI soon).

I can't figure out why buy I can't make the voodoo card to work with this particular mobo.
I have tried my voodoo card on other P4 boards and it runs just fine.
Also the P4s8X-MX runs fine on its own.

My procedure is the following:
1. I install a clean WIN98SE copy and DirectX 7.
2. Shutdown and insert the voodooo 2 into a PCI slot and boot up again.
3. W98 detects the voodoo 2 just fine and ask me for drivers, I manually install drivers via device manager and then reboot.
4. W98 boots again and immediately freezes at the desktop.

What I've tried so far:
-Changing RAM stick (256, 512)
-Changing processor (p4@1,8, P4@2,8, and a few celeron's)
-Installing W98 into different IDE/SATA drives
-Installing the voodoo card into different PCI slots
-Installing different voodoo drivers (latest reference, fast voodoo, diamond)
-Changing the primary VGA card (AGP Geforce, onboard video)

No matter what, I still get the desktop crashing with the voodoo 2 + drivers installed.

NOTE 1: I noticed when moving to a different LCD monitor that W98 brings up the popup that a new hardware have been installed and I can interact without crashing. After finishing with the monitor installating, it freezes as always. So I think the crash is happening at loading the voodoo drivers.
NOTE 2: As I mentioned before, the voodoo card is working 100% fine into different P4 boards.

Any ideas? I just don't know what else to try...
Thanks in advance.

So for some reason this topic had escaped my attention.

You mention you had the Voodoo 2 running on other Pentium 4 boards.
As the Pentium 4 SiS chipsetted boards are actually relatively uncommon, I'd guess that the boards you did get the Voodoo 2 board working in use different chipsets? Because the chipset is basically the first thing that spring to my mind at first glance. Either that or it's something to do with the board itself. Or somehow you got the drivers messed up in some way that I don't know from what I can read here. I don't have any personal experience with that particular chipset.

What drivers are you using?

Most likely the issue is caused by SIS chipset. Try differt BIOS or drivers for your mobo. Use this http://falconfly.3dfx.pl/downloads/voodoo2-30300.zip dirivers or http://falconfly.3dfx.pl/downloads/voodoo2-30101.zip the V3.02.02 are broken and are known to cause the issue with some direct 3d games and ATI cards.

I had a similar problem with a Voodoo2 on an Athlon64 system. My solution was to boot into safe mode, and disable the command that launches the voodoo2 control panel application on startup. Ultimately I think some drivers are just buggy on a fast cpu, so try more drivers.

Also try disabling all but the bare minimum stuff in the bios, like onboard sound, LAN, USB, serial, parallel port. On my Sis 651 board, there are additional options in bios to move integrated stuff to EDB or PCI bus, try switching those around. And other bios options like prefetching, write combining, etc.