VOGONS


First post, by Chadti99

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Purchased one new off eBay, looking for a Rage Pro chipset. This guy is a RageXL PCI and I’ve tried the drivers Included on the installation CD and drivers from the vogons ftp. And so far I’m stuck at 640x480x8. I’ll post some pics of the card and box later if that helps. I’ve had the issue on two different machines so far. Is this a defective card maybe? Any ideas?

System specs:

Asus P3B-F
Tualatin 1.4 Ghz
256MB PC133 SDRAM
Windows 98 SE

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Last edited by Chadti99 on 2021-05-05, 22:02. Edited 6 times in total.

Reply 1 of 16, by Aebtdom

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Can you please provide us with some more details?
Maybe post some screenshots of the display properties in win98. Pictures of the card itself and what hardware you are using.

Builds:

Xp3000+ gf3 ti200 + vd2 SLI 12MB + 768MB + SB live @ WinXP & 98 Dualboot.

P2 350mhz + Diamond Viper V550 + 3Dfx Voodoo 2 12MB + AWE64 + 128MB SDR @ msdos / win98.

Reply 4 of 16, by Chadti99

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Updated first post! And here are a few more pics.

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Last edited by Chadti99 on 2021-05-05, 22:13. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 7 of 16, by Garrett W

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There's no need to install a higher version of DirectX. The card is DX5 and DX6 compliant, I'd install DirectX 7.0, although games released during that era will struggle greatly with this card. In any case, DirectX is not what's causing issues in this case.

Have you tried the following drivers from VogonsDrivers?

Reply 10 of 16, by Chadti99

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No prompt here but I went ahead and installed DX9, unfortunately still having the same issue. If I attempt to change the display resolution it will ask to restart and then I’m presented with this error on startup.

Appreciate everyone’s help so far, I’m sure we’ll figure it out!

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Reply 11 of 16, by Garrett W

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BigDaddyM wrote on 2021-05-06, 08:37:

Nope, it is just like I said. Card have only Dx5-6 features, but newer drivers are compatibile with newer DirectX and require it. DirectX is causing probem.

That does make some sense, the wording on the original post made it a bit difficult for me to understand what you were going for, good call!

However, I will have to insist that the OP try the drivers I linked to. They are from mid 1999 and are all you should need for Rage Pro cards and should work just fine even with DirectX 6 (which is included on the CD for older OSes). I've had mixed experiences with ATi drivers for cards from that era. Flicking through my notes, I see that I managed to get my Xpert98 card to work with J5.12 drivers from BigZ, so you may want to give these a try if the above fail. Installing DX7 is never a bad idea, but I would avoid DX8 and DX9 for Win98SE, I've personally noticed a number of issues creep up with the use of such versions which have never manifested with DX7. Other users seem to concur. Mileage may vary depending on hardware and drivers used (VXD vs WDM for example), but better safe than sorry.

Reply 12 of 16, by BigDaddyM

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Garrett W wrote on 2021-05-06, 13:16:

That does make some sense, the wording on the original post made it a bit difficult for me to understand what you were going for, good call!

Sorry about that 😀 I am not a native english speaker and google like to correct what I am writting and this results in a combination of English and my language 😀

I had some problems with ATI cards (Rage 128Pro, Rage LT Pro) and drivers. Sometimes driver setup run just fine and sometimes it cannot find compatibile hardware 😀 So I just add new hardware from control panel -> graphic card and manualy search drivers on hard drive. Some drivers packages contain drivers for different chips and models so it's a matter of choosing the right model.

Sometimes there are useful informations in readme file.

Here is great website with lots of informations about Rage cards
http://www.oocities.org/ziyadhosein/rprow98.htm

Reply 13 of 16, by Woody72

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I have to agree with Garrett. When I first got my Win 98SE machine home I tried a couple of different DirectX versions and found 7 or 7a were fine but anything else and I got weird side effects like 3D objects in benchmarks completely missing textures etc.

Modern PC: i7-9700KF, 16GB memory, RTX 3060. Proper PC: Pentium 200 MMX, 128MB EDO memory, GeForce2 MX(200).

Reply 15 of 16, by BigDaddyM

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Woody72 wrote on 2021-05-06, 14:02:

I have to agree with Garrett. When I first got my Win 98SE machine home I tried a couple of different DirectX versions and found 7 or 7a were fine but anything else and I got weird side effects like 3D objects in benchmarks completely missing textures etc.

Well, it sounds like poor VGA drivers 😀 DirectX doesn't make the textures disappear but shitty VGA drivers does. What card had these symptoms?

Chadti99 wrote on 2021-05-06, 14:57:

Can I downgrade DirectX?

I think it is possible but I never tried it. I remember there was "directx uninstaller". Did you try to add the card via control panel -> add new hardware etc.?

Last edited by BigDaddyM on 2021-05-06, 15:37. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 16 of 16, by Garrett W

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There's always DirectX Buster. It's been some time since I last used it, although it seemed to work well enough at the time.
If you do indeed downgrade, I suggest installing DX7.0a (I must sound like a broken record by now!) along with one of the drivers suggested above, either the one from the VOGONSDrivers archive or the hacked one by BigZ.