Doc, which card do you use?

I was a bit scared because I didn't know how the flash tool worked exactly and whether I could choose a correct BIOS file and if it would create a backup of the old version. But everything worked fine. You have to power cycle your machine after flashing.

4MB PCI 1164...I think I already did 1.8 and this did not change the issue...but I'll have a look the next days. Thx!

Hope it'll work for you!

Hey Doctor Z,

you were right, it was not the BIOS that did the trick. After you wrote you might have tried that already I wanted to verify my findings and tested Screamer Rally on another machine, and there the 85Hz black screen reappeared. So I thought twice and realized that it might have been another action I took but did not mention the other day. First of all I ran the install.exe in the archive from within DOS and installed the stuff to the MGA folder. Then I ran mgamon.exe and chose Standard VESA 1024 by 768 @ 60 Hz from the monitor list (way down) as my display. Another thing is I inserted vbetsr.com and vbesetup.exe into the autoexec.bat. After reboot Screamer now runs fine again in MSI mode. Maybe this will do for you too.

Thx! I already had 1.8 and it did not work because it's plain dos and does not care for windows drivers. So that solution you mentioned should do the trick. I will check this later because I have no working sound under plain dos. I have to switch the machine. SB128 PCI is not compatible with ALADIN-Chipset the acerboard has. No chance, tried everything, so I have to switch to FSC 250/260 witch has BX440 Onboard sound (not deactivble) and I use SB128PCI too.

Yeah, sound is important of course. I have various cards at hand, in this case I use an old Terratec BASE-1 for ISA bus, works perfectly fine in DOS. The two machines I tested with were Pentium MMX @ VIA VP and AMD K7 @ Irongate, both working great. But the most important component seems to be the monitor, that's what it's all about.

Hey kickloch,
I've got an MGA-1164SG-A, updated to bios v1.8, mgamon configured to 1024 768 @60, and with vbetsr.com and vbesetup.exe in autoexec.bat
Running Screamer Rally msi version, I still get input timings not supported on my monitor, both dos and windows.
Was there anything else you did?

Hey Spark,

sadly not, that was about it, seems like I am lucky enough that my Samsung monitor accepts these settings. Maybe you could try using different other monitor profiles from the mgamon list and see if any of them works for you. And I'm not sure if vbetsr and vbesetup are really necessary, maybe you could try without them?! Any of this will only affect your DOS settings by the way, Windows is a different story. I found some MSI API files on https://www.vintage3d.org/driver.php in the Matrox section but haven't tried them yet so I'm not sure what they can do for your Windows settings...

Hey kickloch, thanks for the tips, you are right it DOES work. I did some more testing using OSSC, which displays the actual refresh rate, and after running mgamon and setting 1024 768 @60, (which creates the inf file) it does adjust the vertical refresh down from 85hz to around 75hz.
- it doesn't work through my monitor's vga port. Only using OSSC on the DVI port, and only with 'Allow TVP HPLL2x' enabled could it get a picture. Also, picture quality is improved with 'Allow upsample2x' enabled.
- the game starts on a corrupted screen if my pci sound card drivers are loaded (SB Live sound card), so no sound in msi mode for me
- fewer lines are displayed, presumably because of the lower refresh rate, some of the top and right of the picture were lost, not a disaster though, still playable (see screenshot), looks like it's missing 25 lines according to the OSSC
- looks like the 'MGA' environment variable needs to be set so that the dos msi program can find the mga.inf settings file created by mgamon. The matrox dosutils installer adds that path to autoexec.bat
- vbetsr and vbesetup are not necessary.

Cheers Spark, nice approach there. Not yet perfect but at least it runs at all though. The missing audio seems to be a downer but maybe in the future you can find another sound card which will work.
Good point with the mga environment variable, I forgot to mention that again, however as it is being set automatically by the installer I was sure you'd figure that out.