appiah4 wrote on 2020-09-05, 07:26:
1.01 IIRC.. I will chevk today.
I should try the 1.03.04 drivers myself!
Ok, so after a bunch of trials and errors I've managed to figure out some stuff.
I accessed the old Guillemot support pages and FAQs for the Maxi Gamer Phoenix and they say the 32bits modes won't work with all newer 3dfx reference drivers (Guillemot used these same drivers, except they changed the banshee.inf file to phoenix.inf and edited a couple of things). The last time they did this was for ver. 1.03.04. Apparently they never released an edited set for the last reference drivers ver. 1.04.00...
Both the Guillemot and the 1.03.04 drivers install just fine on my Win98SE machines and work just fine too, except phoenix.inf doesn't produce that annoying warning error about the hardware probably not being compatible, etc... I guess the device ids inside the phoenix.inf file are a closer match and they don't seem to be present on banshee.inf either... Also, the card and properties sheet show up as... Maxi Gamer Phoenix! 😜
Most way older drivers work well with 32bits (I installed and tried some) but Guillemot's site says that it's a drivers problem that might be fixed in the future and users should just use 16 or 24bits instead...
This was back in 1999 and i still haven't found a set of official or unofficial drivers that corrects this particular issue...
Finally, trying to solve the 32bits problem, i went and flashed and reflashed my Banshee card with all bios i could find (1.00.03-ET from Guillemot (the original on my card), 1.00.10-SG from Guillemot and the reference one from 3dfx and i even tried some from Creative Labs, maybe risking damaging the card because Creative ones use SDRAM instead of SGRAM...). None of these worked and the annoying 32bits glitch happened every time i used newer drivers... I ended up using the last one from Guillemot.
Now for the properties sheet problem: it never shows up if i use the 4.12.01.1222 version files (they are named 3dfx16vb.dll, 3dfx32vb.dll and 3dfxvb.vxd and go on x:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM).
If i copy the 4.12.01.1157 version files from previous 1.03.04 release over the 1.04.00 and install the whole package again, the problem goes away and the properties sheet displays normally. I'm suspecting this is the reason most unofficial drivers set i've found use this version instead of the last one... But maybe someone else who's more of an "expert" on 3dfx stuff can confirm this...
Most of the stuff i used was already uploaded here to VOGONS but i kept the older files i retrieved from Guillemot's site and also the BIOS.
Now, i'm running the card at 24bits, installed everything from scratch with latest reference drivers 1.04.00 but replaced those three files with the older versions before installation and i can now access the properties sheet. There's probably some obvious workaround to this but i'm really no expert and i'm open to suggestions or/and info!