VOGONS


First post, by PunishedSnake

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Hey guys, long time lurker on these here forums here to pick your brains in my first post, if anyone knows the answer to this it's you fellas!

I've been playing around with a Voodoo5 5500 PCI I acquired some time ago and had massive issues in a pure DOS boot with anything that requires more than VESA 1.2, basically using any VESA 2.0+ modes in any application system would hang on a black screen for ages or the monitor would show an Out-Of-Range error after which whatever application was running can be heard eventually resuming as indicated by the audio playing in the background, screen of course still dead.

I've tried all the usual TSRs i.e. VESAFIX, VBEPLUS, UNIREFRESH, VBEHZ and even went as far as installing UNIVBE 5.3A and running the dummy driver, nothing fixed it!

This behaviour doesn't occur at all in Windows 98SE dosbox OR in regular DOS mode with no reboot, I'd thought it had something to do with the driver doing some sort of initialization of the card HOWEVER as chance would have it I accidentally had Quake set to 640x480 after a previous session and discovered that it ran absolutely fine in pure DOS after having run HWINFO in DOS and opening the Video page!

Now has anybody come across this behaviour before? Any idea what HWINFO is doing that makes this work properly for me in DOS? If not, any pointers on isolating the mechanism that HWINFO uses to make this work?

Cheers guys!

Reply 1 of 7, by PunishedSnake

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AAAAAAAAND FIXED! Running GAREPORT.EXE from SciTech SNAP does the same thing HWINFO does apparently, nothing is loaded in memory, it's some weird initialisation issue I think maybe caused by my motherboards BIOS perhaps? If anyone else here has a Voodoo5 try it in normal DOS and reply back and tell me if you can run Quake at 640x480 or above or otherwise any build engine game at any res above 320x200?

Reply 2 of 7, by Justin1091

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I played Duke Nukem 3D in 640x480 a long time ago in pure DOS without issues. Some games like 7th Guest have vertical lines and other garbage across the screen though, but never had a black screen or anything in other games.
Can't think of any more games to try right now, if you want me to test something else feel free to ask! Don't have the PCI version of the card though, but I doubt that makes any difference.

Reply 3 of 7, by PunishedSnake

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Justin1091 wrote:

I played Duke Nukem 3D in 640x480 a long time ago in pure DOS without issues. Some games like 7th Guest have vertical lines and other garbage across the screen though, but never had a black screen or anything in other games.
Can't think of any more games to try right now, if you want me to test something else feel free to ask! Don't have the PCI version of the card though, but I doubt that makes any difference.

OK try this, download any recent Linux ISO and tell me if you can see GRUB?

Reply 4 of 7, by Justin1091

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PunishedSnake wrote:
Justin1091 wrote:

I played Duke Nukem 3D in 640x480 a long time ago in pure DOS without issues. Some games like 7th Guest have vertical lines and other garbage across the screen though, but never had a black screen or anything in other games.
Can't think of any more games to try right now, if you want me to test something else feel free to ask! Don't have the PCI version of the card though, but I doubt that makes any difference.

OK try this, download any recent Linux ISO and tell me if you can see GRUB?

Don't know for sure if it's what you meant, but I got the installation wizard (1024x768 I think) and the dos looking help pages (f1) to show. To get grub to show I would first need to install it right? I can't do that because I don't want to mess up my dual boot.

Reply 5 of 7, by PunishedSnake

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Nah so by GRUB I mean the initial bootscreen of the ISO, but never mind that as it works for you!
Ths means that the issue must be isolated to a combination of the card and specific motherboards/BIOSes, thanks for checking it out man!

Reply 6 of 7, by moog

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I would definitely like to know what you did to get the Voodoo 5500 working with greater VESA/VBE modes. All I can muster with Duke Nukem 3D is the stock resolution, despite of me selecting 800x600 in VESA 2.0 in the setup. Oddly enough, setup claims it to be the highest. That's BS, the card can easily handle 1280x1024, while some versions of Windows (tried ReactOS and XP SP3) may try and run 1920x1080 on the 5500 and while it succeeds, the screen is misadjusted.

I have a stock FreeDOS 1.3 RC5, Voodoo 5500 AGP, and the only non-stock resolutions I can get are:
- Quake 1 - basically any resolution
- GTA1 - 640x480 and 800x600 in 3dfx mode, when I use the glide2x.ovl taken from Windows 98 driver

Audigy 2 ZS in FreeDOS
LinLin adapter documentation
+ various capacitor list threads

Reply 7 of 7, by Aebtdom

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Ive played mechwarrior 2 for a while in 1024x768. Software mode though. Did nothing to get this working besides installing mw2 and run the game on my vd5, its an AGP card though.

Builds:

Xp3000+ gf3 ti200 + vd2 SLI 12MB + 768MB + SB live @ WinXP & 98 Dualboot.

P2 350mhz + Diamond Viper V550 + 3Dfx Voodoo 2 12MB + AWE64 + 128MB SDR @ msdos / win98.