marbury wrote on 2023-03-11, 20:57:

I am planning on keeping the Hercules card only so I am only interested in a fix for this card. Does anybody have the mentioned Hercules card and knows how to configure it to run win 3.1?

I have a Hercules branded S3 Trio64V+ and I'm using the drivers from this Hercules CD. Those work great for me under both Win 3.1 and Win95.

I think that CD may also have the drivers for your Virge card. Might be worth checking it out.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-03-11, 21:02:

I am using the drivers from this Hercules CD. Those work great for me under both Win 3.1 and Win95.

I think that CD may also have the drivers for your Virge card. Might be worth checking it out.

Yeah that’s exactly the one I am using. I also selected the Hercules driver in the windows setup from dos. The only thing I am not getting is the crt config. I am using an Ossc which does a bunch of hsync values which is connected to my LCD screen which does 120Hz so I selected N in the crt config and tried a couple of std selections. I even removed the setcrt from autoexec.bat. But the outcome is always the same. Also I don’t suspect the ossc to be the problem. Because it should just display garbage and the pc should not freeze.
The only config that currently works is default vga driver shipped with windows.

marbury wrote on 2023-03-11, 20:57:

I recently got my hands on two really nice Virge DX cards. An EONtronics Virge DX and a Hercules Terminator 3D/DX.

Both are working really well in dos and all dos games I threw at them yet. But I cannot get any usable screen config for win 3.11

For each card I tried the 1.05.05 and 1.05.09 drivers from vogons and other sources to no avail. For the Herc I also tried the og driver cd they released for it. And I also tried almost all resolution/color depth combinations. But all I get is a variant of the added screenshot and a frozen pc.

Contrary to popular belief, a 2D Trio driver does usually not work on the Virge. While the CRTC and memory access logic on the Trio64 and the Virge are identical, the acceleration is completely different. The 2D acceleration engine of the classic S3 chips, starting at the S3 911 up to the Trio64V+ are inspired by the IBM 8514/A graphics logic. On the other hand, the Virge accelerator is a single combined 2D/3D acceleration engine. The 2D acceleration commands of the Virge are variants of the 3D acceleration commands, and work entirely different from the 8514/A. The only Trio drivers that could work on a Virge chip are completely unaccelerated drivers. I don't know if such drivers exist officially, but I wouldn't be surprised if SciTech made "generic VESA drivers" for Windows 3.1

mkarcher wrote on 2023-03-12, 00:08:

Contrary to popular belief, a 2D Trio driver does usually not work on the Virge.

Na, I am using the specific drivers for the virge DX. I am not trying with trio drivers and the driver cd mentioned above is a set of basically all drivers for Hercules cards from these times with multiple readmes detailed to the specific button press how to install and configure the driver specific to the card. But as I said it does not work.

Um, isn't the DX an 82C375? The 82C325 was the original ViRGE.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-03-12, 05:11:

Um, isn't the DX an 82C375? The 82C325 was the original ViRGE.

That's true. On the other hand, as long as the driver doesn't check for the chip ID, a ViRGE 325 driver is very likely able to work with the 375 as well. The main difference between those chips is that the 375 is specified for higher clocks, and has optimized implementations of some internal algorithms for 3D texture mapping.

So I take it that budget cards like the Trio64V2 are cut back versions of the Virge chips and use the newer 2D acceleration method?

All S3 Virge / VirgeDX cards I have are ELSA brand and their Driver CDs are available on many places including on Archive.org, for example:

https://archive.org/details/elsa-winnerware-e-98

but they were releasing such Driver CDs in the past regularly, few times a year, i.e. they are good archive of drivers in general.

So, the S3 driver for Win31 on the above CD is located at:

1ELSA WINNERware E-98.ISO\VICTORY\3DX\WIN31

there is even further S3 driver archive on the good old "Retronn" ftp server (thank you Michael!):

1ftp://retronn.de/driver/Elsa
2
3ftp://retronn.de/driver/S3
4
5ftp://retronn.de/driver/driver/Hercules

I guess it's just matter of try all or almost all available versions until you find one that works correctly for you.

[EDIT] the Win311 drive specifically for S3 Virge, i.e. 86C325 chip I found here:

1ftp://retronn.de/driver/Elsa/ftp/GRAPHICS/VICTORY/3D

the one for S3 VirgeDX, i.e. 86C375 chip is here:

1ftp://retronn.de/driver/Elsa/ftp/GRAPHICS/VICTORY/3DX

Jo22 wrote on 2023-03-12, 05:11:

Um, isn't the DX an 82C375? The 82C325 was the original ViRGE.

You are right. It’s „just“ a Terminator 3D without the DX. Why did I mess this up? Anyway. The eon is definitely one 86C375 and it freezes with the same screen and the Virge DX drivers v 1.05.05 and .09. But after a second look in the readme of the Hercules driver CD it offers one driver only for the 3D and the 3D/DX so this shouldn’t freeze.

mattw wrote on 2023-03-12, 12:26:

All S3 Virge / VirgeDX cards I have are ELSA brand and their Driver CDs are available on many places including on Archive.org, f […]
Show full quote

All S3 Virge / VirgeDX cards I have are ELSA brand and their Driver CDs are available on many places including on Archive.org, for example:

https://archive.org/details/elsa-winnerware-e-98

but they were releasing such Driver CDs in the past regularly, few times a year, i.e. they are good archive of drivers in general.

So, the S3 driver for Win31 on the above CD is located at:

Copy code to clipboard

1ELSA WINNERware E-98.ISO\VICTORY\3DX\WIN31

there is even further S3 driver archive on the good old "Retronn" ftp server (thank you Michael!):

Copy code to clipboard

1ftp://retronn.de/driver/Elsa
2
3ftp://retronn.de/driver/S3
4
5ftp://retronn.de/driver/driver/Hercules

I guess it's just matter of try all or almost all available versions until you find one that works correctly for you.

[EDIT] the Win311 drive specifically for S3 Virge, i.e. 86C325 chip I found here:

Copy code to clipboard

1ftp://retronn.de/driver/Elsa/ftp/GRAPHICS/VICTORY/3D

the one for S3 VirgeDX, i.e. 86C375 chip is here:

Copy code to clipboard

1ftp://retronn.de/driver/Elsa/ftp/GRAPHICS/VICTORY/3DX

Thanks for the links. I tried a couple of those including the Hercules one. But they all just give a broken screen with a frozen pc. The cards themselves are working fine. Even played some Wing Commander 4 today with SVGA resolution. I don't really need windows for the most part because this is a pure dos games box. So Dos + Norton Commander is all I need 99% of the time. But since 3.1 was running fine with the Trio and now I can't get it to work for the love of me this strikes me as odd a bit. We'll see how it goes. With the Trio it took me a while to find the correct drivers, too. I only could get it to work with the og drivers from Miro which made that specific card. For the eontronic virge dx I can only find w95 drivers. It might be that they didn't create any win 3 drivers since this specific virge was sold in low priced Aldi PCs in the late 90s. But I wonder why the Hercules card does not work with its og drivers.

Had some luck and somebody gave away another Virge DX (yes it's a 375) for practically free. And it is as Virge DX as it can get. Even has the Virge Copyright sticker on the bios chip. But whatever I do I haven't gotten any Virge DX driver to work with win3.1 yet? Is there a specific reason this is so hard?

It's this card from the wikipedia entry but with 4MB

marbury wrote on 2023-03-22, 08:42:

Had some luck and somebody gave away another Virge DX (yes it's a 375) for practically free. And it is as Virge DX as it can get. Even has the Virge Copyright sticker on the bios chip. But whatever I do I haven't gotten any Virge DX driver to work with win3.1 yet? Is there a specific reason this is so hard?

A while back, I had a Virge DX in my DOS/Win3.1 machine and I don't remember having any issues with the driver installation.

Here's what I used at the time, in case it helps. The card was a generic "no name" Virge DX with 4 MB RAM.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-03-22, 08:55:

A while back, I had a Virge DX in my DOS/Win3.1 machine and I don't remember having any issues with the driver installation.

Here's what I used at the time, in case it helps. The card was a generic "no name" Virge DX with 4 MB RAM.

Actually I tried that driver first to no avail. I have also tried the 1.05.05, the latest Terminator 3D (DX) drivers, Diamond 3D 2k pro, some Matrox drivers I found. No chance. Windows starts with the logo, short black screen, then broken screen and frozen PC most of the time. Sometimes I still can Alt-F4 ENTER exit to dos. But most of the time it's frozen.

I had similar problems with a Trio64 which turned out to be from Miro and I only got it to work once I found the Miro drivers. I will try and find a driver specifically for the BIOS version printed on the board. We'll see how that goes.

At this point, I would suggest a clean install of Win 3.1, if you haven't already tried that.

It's odd that so many drivers keep failing for you.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-03-22, 10:52:

At this point, I would suggest a clean install of Win 3.1, if you haven't already tried that.

It's odd that so many drivers keep failing for you.

Yeah no. Already did that when I switched out the Trio for the ViRGE because I thought that was the reason. But maybe I try reinstalling again at some point when I am really bored. For now though no Win 3.11. Don't need it anyway. Would just have been nice.
Btw I found a driver for the "FVGAP-S34.2E" (printed on the board) specifically. Funny thing it's just the 1.05.05 version and of course it doesn't work no matter which resolution. Not even the 640x480 256.
Yeah I am officially giving up for now. Thanks anyway.