Hey man, let's reboot. I came out as irritated, that's kinda out of character for me and for this I apologize. I definitely don't consider myself highly knowledgeable on the most technical aspects and internal hardware dark magic, yet I have enough experience for some troubleshooting and applying some logic at least...or so I hope.
This place is unique for the collective knowledge and skills and I appreciate and respect it a lot. It's why I am posting here when I can't figure something out on my own. I learn new stuff almost daily just by lurking the different forums. Anyways back on topic.
Your porch settings idea still sounds like a dead end to me for several reasons, yet I am happy to learn something new and be proven wrong. My empirical train of thoughts is as follows:
- The settings cannot be stored on the card itself as far as I know, so it would be software related. You even said earlier that drivers with such capabilities are rare. So...where would these wrong settings initially come from (certainly not from the factory), and how would they stick to the card going from one machine to the other?
- In addition to the previous point, this is a consumer AGP card from ASUS, an actually very common one back in the days, and I'm not trying some highly complex or peculiar workflow: I'm trying to change display settings from the "standard" 640x480x16colors using several versions of the proper drivers for this card, on two different period-correct builds, and two period-correct CRT's. This is as default as it gets, and I've been running several computers + benchmarking a plethora of hardware on these very builds and screens, there's nothing exotic about any of it.
- In both builds under Win98 the same issue of getting an active blackscreen in Win98 happens as soon as I set it up to something else than the default 640x480x16colors. In some cases, I got a working cursor on top of the blackscreen. In both cases, switching to another AGP card and installing its drivers and there's absolutely no problem anymore.
- The same card in XP cannot initialize the drivers properly, but somewhat "works". I am definitely not an expert to explain the difference between 98 vs XP handling of devices and generic drivers, so yeah it was kinda a surprise to see such a different behavior under XP. But thinking about it, the issue is different: in 98 the driver for the card is used, in XP the drivers fails to start and a generic one is used instead, it's not a direct comparison of Win98 vs WinXP default VGA driver capabilities.
The logical conclusion to me is that there's a problem with the card and/or Windows drivers, as I haven't been able to reproduce the issue under DOS. The card is the only common denominator. And I highly doubt an ASUS highly popular consumer card would be unable to accomodate standard resolutions under Win98 on a CRT. Adding the fact that the official XP drivers off ASUS website for this very card also fails to load just feels like another big argument for the card having an issue in my opinion.
I definitely feel an itch to purchase an oscilloscope as I'd love to get more into electronics, so I might take up on your suggestion 😀
And again I'm not trying to use that card at all costs and find workarounds, VBE drivers under Windows etc... I just never like to get rid of hardware without trying to save them first, and it would be an excellent occasion to maybe learn something new. It's a neat and iconic card/chip from an era I like, I'd be happy to save it, but if nothing can be done it's fine as well. I'm currently running a Rage 128 Pro instead in that particular build and it's just as fine.
Sorry again for my poor mood earlier, and if you think there are holes or mistakes in my assumptions and train of thoughts and/or if you have more diagnostic ideas, I'd be glad to read it.