Thanks to some help of swaaye and Putas here on Vogons we've managed to locate the problem.

It seems the game is not compatible with never revisions of the Mystique (1164SG-A, or the Mystique 220), but rather requires the older 1064SG-D to run. I just acquired an older 1064SG-D and now the game works without problems.

Also found out what caused the black DOS screen crash that I saw in all versions of the game. It was the soundcard. Either disable it or replace it and it caused no problem any longer.

I have had some problems with other DOS Matrox Mystique supported games, so I'll do some testing to see how well the compatibility is for the 1164.

Games tested so far:
- Battle Arena Toshinden: Crashes on 1164SG-A, works with 1064SG-D.
- Tomb Raider: Works on 1164SG-A
- Screamer Rally (and then most likely Screamer 2 since they use the same engine): Works on both cards (but I've experienced crashes on my Compaq machine with the 1164SG-A, dunno what causes it. 440bx machine works without issues)

Tomb Raider works OK on 1064. No LAGs, nice color, crisp image. Although my Mystique is a weird 1064 with 220 Mhz RAMDAC, which was typical for 1164 ("220"). It also has only 2 MB of memory and is made by Compaq.

More games tested with the 1164 and 4.12.013 driver. Those games that caused problems I've also tested with the 1064:
DOS:
-Actua Soccer: Crashes the same way as Battle Arena Toshinden. Works without issues on the 1064.
-UEFA Champions League 1996/1997: Not perfect. Some few texture glitches,but the patch only makes it worse. 640x400 resolution. Same issues on the 1064, so it must be my system or the game.

WINDOWS:
-Scorched Planet: OK
-Mechwarrior 2: OK
-Destruction Derby 2: OK
-Monster Trucks DEMO: OK
-Time Warriors: Does not work with latest Matrox drivers (4.12.013). Crashes after 3 seconds with the Windows 98 driver and the others I tried. Here my system could have a finger in the game. Will need further testing. Same issues with the 1064.
-Croc: OK (but S3 Virge with GX2 runs better 🤣)

Can also add that there was quite a significant FPS increase in Screamer Rally when going from the 1064 to the 1164.

Fascinating work as always, Vetz!

I learned an interesting bit of trivia about Toshinden (PC port) recently.

The PC version of Toshinden is basically the PSX source bolted to a PS1 high-level emulation. Kazzuya (the guy who made a GPU plugin for "PSEmu Pro" PS1 emulator back in the day) actually did it. This isn't emulation per se since the code is compiled for x86, it's just a library with the same APIs as the PS1 development kit.

Not sure how true it is since it doesn't quite jive with Kazzuya's story of not getting the sourcecode until late in the development stage:
Toshinden for PC (1996): http://v5.kazzuya.com/p/works.html

Some nice trivia there Stiletto 😀

Tested UEFA on my Compaq machine. No texture glitches there on both the cards. I ran it without the patch, so I have no idea what that patch actually do (beside making more texture mess on my 440bx system).

Time Warrios intially crashed on my Compaq machine with a black screen at start up. Later found out that was due to my soundcard. De-activated sound in the setup menu and the game started up. Untill it crashed the same way as on my 440bx system.

I was lost. With some searching on Google Groups I found a user who suggested deactivating bus mastering with the MGA Powerdesk software. I deactived it and voila, no more problems! I only tested with my 1064 card, but I'm pretty sure this fixed it on the 1164 too 😀

So the conclusion to this thread is that:
- Battle Arena Toshinden &
- Actua Soccer
requires an original Mystique with the 1064 chip.

I would not settle for simply saying 1064 works, my revision H does not.

RacoonRider wrote:

Tomb Raider works OK on 1064. No LAGs, nice color, crisp image. Although my Mystique is a weird 1064 with 220 Mhz RAMDAC, which was typical for 1164 ("220"). It also has only 2 MB of memory and is made by Compaq.

Is your chip G revision by any chance?

perhaps some games are like tomb raider iirc they had 2 versions
1 for the 2mb version ond 1 for the 4mb version
maybe your card isnt working because its the 2mb version ?

because of this thread I tried tombraider on a p2 system with a Mystique 1064/2MB I was gifted... wish the card was a 4MB one 🙁

State exact chips please, there are some 2 MB cards working. I noticed newer Mystique revisions do not want to texture from system memory...

^ I will check mine tomorrow if needed, it's a 1064 and I only tested TR...

Just tested Battle Arena Toshinden on a P120 with 32MB of RAM. First I popped in my good old Matrox Millennium with the memory expansion card (total of 6MB). This card already have Gouraud shading acceleration, which this game use alot of. I got 12 FPS in 640x400 with everything set to maximum. Then I tested with the Nvidia NV1, and guess what, I got 10 FPS! Not quite what I was expecting.

I can also add that I tested the Matrox Millennium with NASCAR Racing and I was quite surprised how that card accelerated that game even on a P120. It was almost as good as seen in my comparison video that was run on a 1ghz P3!

Did some more testing. Seems like the Mystique patch for Battle Arena Toshinden breaks NV1 support. I patched back to 2.1 and voila, suddenly I got 20-25 FPS with the NV1.

Try to find a Mystique edition of Mechwarrior 2. It was an amazing version. And Scorched Planet looked nice on the Mystique ( I think it shipped with the card ) but it lacked something, more of a tech demo than an enjoyable game.

The Mystique conversion files is available here on Vogons. Also the Mystique version isn't that good when you got the PowerVR version. It has good framerate, but lacks bilinear filtering due to the card. It was probably better back in 1996 when framerate was king 😀

See my comparison video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWzWdwj9NvU if you are interested to see the some from the Mystique version.

Yeah when I got my Mystique home from the store in 1996 I was bursting with excitement, but Motoracer looked exactly the same as software, only it ran with three times more FPS. I could play Motoracer now in 640x480 with no slowdown and everything was crisp, but there was no bi-linear filtering. Would have been an amazing card if it had bi-linear. But I didn't really care after an hour or two. Mechwarrior was dark and moody and with 16bit colour in full SVGA with no slowdown, simply astounding. There were so many shades of orange and brown on the ground texture it didn't really matter about the lack of bi-linear. Of course, some games were starting to be developed to make use of bi-linear, such as Quake II, and running the GL Quake without that feature made the game retain it's ugly, garish looks. But I fogive the Mystique - simply for giving me that awesome MW2 version and not costing the world.

Six months later I bought a VooDoo anyways, but I WISH I'd have kept that matrox. Would love to play with it now.

In those old games I find not having bilinear is sometimes almost preferable. Pixelation appears more detailed. In fact when I had a Voodoo1+Mystique setup I used to switch between the cards just for that reason.

Yep this is true. Sometimes the bi-linear gets a little washed out, especially on large surfaces with pixels of roughly the same colour making up the texture. This happened a lot in Twisted Metal 2 and the Test Drive games. The Mystique lacked the smooth looking filtering, but I also really didn't mind. The problem was the compatibility and lack of developer support. Basically, the voodoo took over the industry and the Mystique was messy in D3D.

It probably doesn't help that the Voodoo's dac introduces more blur for the farther mipmaps due to its strange anti-dither. That's another thing i'm NOSTALGIC about in the Voodoo I wish were reimplemented in Glide emulators/wrappers.

What exactly changed from the early Mystique to the later one that causes incompatibilities with some games (besides the faster RAMDAC)?