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Reply 40 of 43, by DustyShinigami

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Awesome. Just stumbled on a Medion GeForce 4 Ti 4200 128Mb for about £40. It looks like they have about 3-4 of them. Much cheaper than the one I was watching, which has a starting price of £60 but is only 64Mb. 😄

OS: Windows 98 SE
CPU: Slot 1 Pentium III Coppermine 933MHz (SL448)
RAM: Kingston 256MB 133MHz
GPU: Nvidia 16MB Riva TNT
Motherboard: ABit AB-BE6-II Intel 440BX
HDD: 30GB - IDE 3; 40GB - IDE 3; 80GB - IDE 4

Reply 41 of 43, by asdf53

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DustyShinigami wrote on Yesterday, 19:31:

Okay. In my case the BUS type is AGP and the Memory Base Addresses are D4000000 - D4FFFFFF and D6000000 - 07000007. That last one is different to what it says in the Device Manager. I'll try changing it from hardware to BIOS next and see what happens.

EDIT: Setting it from Hardware Enumeration to DOS worked fine. No crashes. But still get the same results with all of those errors. I also tried manually adding the address in the extended options, but it always says 'can not set environment variable 'CMDLINE'. Environment full?' And it still proceeds to set it to D6000000 - D6FFFFFF.

Wait, but that's off. That second range should be D6000000 - D6FFFFFF (16 MB). But the upper boundary here (07000000) is actually lower than the starting offset. That's exactly what MATS complained about: Start location is greater than end location. So there's a chance that your BIOS is improperly assigning resources to the graphics card, or that the graphics card is requesting an abnormal amount of memory, and that's why the tools stumbled. To test if the BIOS or the card is to blame you'd need a second motherboard to try it on.

When Windows boots, it re-scans the PCI bus and does its own assignment, possibly correcting the BIOS's mistake, so you had the correct addresses there.

Now the interesting question: If you disable that re-assignment by setting the PCI bus in Windows to BIOS enumeration mode, does it retain that suspicious D6000000 - 07000007 in the TNT's device manager resources tab? Or does it correct it to D6000000 - D6FFFFFF?

Something else I found in VMCE: Boot to Windows or DOS, put in the VMCE floppy, and edit A:\autoexec.bat. At the locations where it calls "vmtce.exe", change that to "vmtce.exe /Verbose:1". This will make it output a couple of extra lines on startup, in particular "VBE Memory Range" and "Found PCI video device: X bytes reported, X bytes found". It would be interesting to see what it's saying there.

What about the Geforce 4 MX, does it also have the wrong upper boundary under DOS in Hwinfo?

About that Medion card, nice. Just be aware that this one is underclocked and 10% slower than a regular 4200. It's basically the lowest end Geforce 4 you can get, but the difference isn't large and you can overclock it. One user also mentioned that it has good signal quality: Re: Anyone here knows or owns a MEDION GEFORCE 4 ti4200?

That, and not performance, would be my biggest concern, since cards from that era could have vastly different picture quality between manufacturers. I have two Geforce 4's and the cheaper model has a noticeably dimmer output than the higher end model.

Reply 42 of 43, by DustyShinigami

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asdf53 wrote on Today, 00:10:
Wait, but that's off. That second range should be D6000000 - D6FFFFFF (16 MB). But the upper boundary here (07000000) is actuall […]
Show full quote
DustyShinigami wrote on Yesterday, 19:31:

Okay. In my case the BUS type is AGP and the Memory Base Addresses are D4000000 - D4FFFFFF and D6000000 - 07000007. That last one is different to what it says in the Device Manager. I'll try changing it from hardware to BIOS next and see what happens.

EDIT: Setting it from Hardware Enumeration to DOS worked fine. No crashes. But still get the same results with all of those errors. I also tried manually adding the address in the extended options, but it always says 'can not set environment variable 'CMDLINE'. Environment full?' And it still proceeds to set it to D6000000 - D6FFFFFF.

Wait, but that's off. That second range should be D6000000 - D6FFFFFF (16 MB). But the upper boundary here (07000000) is actually lower than the starting offset. That's exactly what MATS complained about: Start location is greater than end location. So there's a chance that your BIOS is improperly assigning resources to the graphics card, or that the graphics card is requesting an abnormal amount of memory, and that's why the tools stumbled. To test if the BIOS or the card is to blame you'd need a second motherboard to try it on.

When Windows boots, it re-scans the PCI bus and does its own assignment, possibly correcting the BIOS's mistake, so you had the correct addresses there.

Now the interesting question: If you disable that re-assignment by setting the PCI bus in Windows to BIOS enumeration mode, does it retain that suspicious D6000000 - 07000007 in the TNT's device manager resources tab? Or does it correct it to D6000000 - D6FFFFFF?

Something else I found in VMCE: Boot to Windows or DOS, put in the VMCE floppy, and edit A:\autoexec.bat. At the locations where it calls "vmtce.exe", change that to "vmtce.exe /Verbose:1". This will make it output a couple of extra lines on startup, in particular "VBE Memory Range" and "Found PCI video device: X bytes reported, X bytes found". It would be interesting to see what it's saying there.

What about the Geforce 4 MX, does it also have the wrong upper boundary under DOS in Hwinfo?

About that Medion card, nice. Just be aware that this one is underclocked and 10% slower than a regular 4200. It's basically the lowest end Geforce 4 you can get, but the difference isn't large and you can overclock it. One user also mentioned that it has good signal quality: Re: Anyone here knows or owns a MEDION GEFORCE 4 ti4200?

That, and not performance, would be my biggest concern, since cards from that era could have vastly different picture quality between manufacturers. I have two Geforce 4's and the cheaper model has a noticeably dimmer output than the higher end model.

Ah-haa. Interesting. Hmm. I do have a second motherboard - my MSI MS-6156. The snag though is I don't really have any space to set it up. Hmm. It's probably one of those things I'd have to look at playing around with in the future. Though the other motherboard's BIOS really doesn't have many options to adjust, unlike my current one, which is much more customisable.

I'll have to check and see what the Device Manager reports now. It's still left at BIOS from PCI. Thanks for the tip regarding the autoexec file for VMCE; I'll give that a try later and report back the results. I'll also give the Geforce 4 another test and see what its addresses are.

And yeah, I did briefly read something about it being slightly underclocked and having good signal quality in that thread. I'm not sure if I've added a utility to my collection to overclock GPUs as it wasn't something I figured I'd need. But bumping back up by 10% should be easy enough. I'll make a note of the default clock speeds for that particular model.

OS: Windows 98 SE
CPU: Slot 1 Pentium III Coppermine 933MHz (SL448)
RAM: Kingston 256MB 133MHz
GPU: Nvidia 16MB Riva TNT
Motherboard: ABit AB-BE6-II Intel 440BX
HDD: 30GB - IDE 3; 40GB - IDE 3; 80GB - IDE 4

Reply 43 of 43, by DustyShinigami

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asdf53 wrote on Today, 00:10:
Wait, but that's off. That second range should be D6000000 - D6FFFFFF (16 MB). But the upper boundary here (07000000) is actuall […]
Show full quote
DustyShinigami wrote on Yesterday, 19:31:

Okay. In my case the BUS type is AGP and the Memory Base Addresses are D4000000 - D4FFFFFF and D6000000 - 07000007. That last one is different to what it says in the Device Manager. I'll try changing it from hardware to BIOS next and see what happens.

EDIT: Setting it from Hardware Enumeration to DOS worked fine. No crashes. But still get the same results with all of those errors. I also tried manually adding the address in the extended options, but it always says 'can not set environment variable 'CMDLINE'. Environment full?' And it still proceeds to set it to D6000000 - D6FFFFFF.

Wait, but that's off. That second range should be D6000000 - D6FFFFFF (16 MB). But the upper boundary here (07000000) is actually lower than the starting offset. That's exactly what MATS complained about: Start location is greater than end location. So there's a chance that your BIOS is improperly assigning resources to the graphics card, or that the graphics card is requesting an abnormal amount of memory, and that's why the tools stumbled. To test if the BIOS or the card is to blame you'd need a second motherboard to try it on.

When Windows boots, it re-scans the PCI bus and does its own assignment, possibly correcting the BIOS's mistake, so you had the correct addresses there.

Now the interesting question: If you disable that re-assignment by setting the PCI bus in Windows to BIOS enumeration mode, does it retain that suspicious D6000000 - 07000007 in the TNT's device manager resources tab? Or does it correct it to D6000000 - D6FFFFFF?

Something else I found in VMCE: Boot to Windows or DOS, put in the VMCE floppy, and edit A:\autoexec.bat. At the locations where it calls "vmtce.exe", change that to "vmtce.exe /Verbose:1". This will make it output a couple of extra lines on startup, in particular "VBE Memory Range" and "Found PCI video device: X bytes reported, X bytes found". It would be interesting to see what it's saying there.

What about the Geforce 4 MX, does it also have the wrong upper boundary under DOS in Hwinfo?

About that Medion card, nice. Just be aware that this one is underclocked and 10% slower than a regular 4200. It's basically the lowest end Geforce 4 you can get, but the difference isn't large and you can overclock it. One user also mentioned that it has good signal quality: Re: Anyone here knows or owns a MEDION GEFORCE 4 ti4200?

That, and not performance, would be my biggest concern, since cards from that era could have vastly different picture quality between manufacturers. I have two Geforce 4's and the cheaper model has a noticeably dimmer output than the higher end model.

Okay, so I've tried my Geforce 4. I can only check with HWINFO and not the Device Manager in Windows. According to that the three memory addresses are: E4000000 - E4FFFFFF, D0000000 - D8000007, and D8000000 - D8080007. VMCE lists it as being D0000000 - D7FFFFFF.

For the TNT, it's still set to BIOS and the address is still D6000000 - D6FFFFFF.

I can't edit the autoexec file in DOS as it complains the floppy disk is full. I have to do it in Windows. I tried adding the verbose:1 command, but nothing different appeared to happen. Not sure if I need to add it in other places.

OS: Windows 98 SE
CPU: Slot 1 Pentium III Coppermine 933MHz (SL448)
RAM: Kingston 256MB 133MHz
GPU: Nvidia 16MB Riva TNT
Motherboard: ABit AB-BE6-II Intel 440BX
HDD: 30GB - IDE 3; 40GB - IDE 3; 80GB - IDE 4