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ATI Radeon 9200 AGP card in Windows 95?

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First post, by JonnyGators

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As I do my youtube series of going through Windows upgrades from 1 to 10 on a Pentium 4, I've reached 95. Now, I could just move along to 98 where I know I have a working driver for this card, but I do want to try and push things as far as I can with each version of Windows, and I feel like I'm close to getting this, if possible.

I started this part of the process on an installation of 95 that was installed with the retail 95 upgrade, from 3.1. I also installed Plus.

I started by looking at the available drivers here. I found this - http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … 567&menustate=0

9x should technically mean 95 and 98 to someone that takes words at their face value. But I'm finding that's not always the case, things labeled 9x seem to not always work in 95. Frustrating that so many manufacturers, whether they mean to or not, end up leaving me with misguiding information. But, whatever. I grabbed this package, installed it, and immediately got an error about a missing .dll file. I forget the name now, but it was something I was able to copy over from 98. The same place I found that mentioned needing to copy that .dll from elsewhere, recommended installing DX8. So I grabbed an installer for that and ran that. And that install told me I need to install DCOM, so I found that, still available from Microsoft's website.

I then ran the catalyst installer, and after it installed, it reported not finding any hardware that would work with it.

So, I went into the device manager, and manually installed the Radeon 9200 drivers to the devices from there, and it accepted the drivers as a valid driver.

And now where I am is that, no matter what I do, every time Windows boots up, I get an error that "The ATI2EVXX.EXE file is linked to missing export USER32.DLL:ChangeDisplaySettingsExA."

Best I can figure ,the driver/ati software relies on a newer version of user32.dll than I have.

I tried replacing that dll with the version I have in 98, as this video card works perfectly fine in 98. That makes 95 blue screen on boot, so I rolled that back.

Everytime I try uninstalling the driver, Windows 95 insists on automatically reinstalling the Radeon driver, for my convenience.

I renamed the ATI folder.....it still reinstalls the driver.

I can manually select one of the generic drivers, and it will hold that.

Problem is, Windows 95 always likes to bitch at me about a hardware conflict, because since this card has a 2nd output (s-video or composite), it is in the device manager as 2 devices, primary and secondary. And Windows 95 sees these devices as conflicting. Before installing the ATI driver, I could uninstall the secondary, reboot, it would detect the new device, ask me what I want to do with it, I could tell it do nothing, and that option also makes it not ask me again. But now, if there's no driver installed, Windows 95 is all like, ok, that broken ass Radeon driver that the end user clearly doesn't want to use is right there, lets automatically apply it.

Not that this is a problem, just.....I'm pissed about that out of principle.

Moving right along, I can leave the Radeon driver on, and just never try to change the display mode to more than 16 color, and everything is fine (if I select 256 or more, I get caught in a loop of it being unable to apply the change, and asking me to fix it, until I force the driver to a generic one and restart), or just leave both on the generic drivers, and ignore the bitching about a hardware conflict. So, I'm not stuck or dead in the water, but I still want to get this driver to work somehow.

Or it would be nice to at least get rid of the error that comes up every time I boot. But....I can live with that, the 98 upgrade should fix things.

Anyways.....if I can get the driver to work in 95, that would be nice. So, if I want to get that to work, I'm stuck on the user32.dll error.

So, I figured....well.....I'm on retail 95. There are newer versions of 95. Maybe later versions of 95 had an updated version of user32.dll that will make this driver happy. So I forced an upgrade to OSR 2.5. Found a little trick online about updating a file using notepad after running the setup, and it worked, so I now have OSR 2.5. But that's made no change to the user32.dll error on boot.

And so that's where I'm at. Which, if I think of nothing else, oh well....I'll move along to the 98 upgrade and try to fix everything up there, I should have drivers for everything in that environment and should be able to get an OS without boot errors. But I wanted to throw this out there to see if anyone has any further suggestions about getting this card to work with more than 16 colors in 95.

Reply 1 of 42, by Repo Man11

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Looks as though there's an older version than what you're trying now on this page: In search of Win98 Catalyst 4.X and 5.X
Good luck.

"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy."

Reply 2 of 42, by JonnyGators

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4.1 cleared the startup error. Now Windows 95 wants ati2cqag.dll off of the ATI Installation CD. The path that the 4.1 installer extracted includes an ati2cqag.dl_. Now I need to figure out how to trick the ATI software, that still doesn't think I have their hardware despite Windows 95 recognizing it as ATI hardware, into extracting the file I need.

Reply 3 of 42, by JonnyGators

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Ok, so browsing to the folder with the dl_ files works when 95 wants the files, I guess it automatically extracts what it needs.

But, what is really frustrating is it seems now most of the time I can't get the "have disk" option to show up when applying drivers, so I'm at the mercy of the lists, and I have no idea what is garbage that is still there from the old install, or the one I'm actually trying to install.

And now I'm back to having the user32.dll error on boot.

Reply 4 of 42, by darry

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JonnyGators wrote on 2020-07-25, 20:49:

Ok, so browsing to the folder with the dl_ files works when 95 wants the files, I guess it automatically extracts what it needs.

But, what is really frustrating is it seems now most of the time I can't get the "have disk" option to show up when applying drivers, so I'm at the mercy of the lists, and I have no idea what is garbage that is still there from the old install, or the one I'm actually trying to install.

And now I'm back to having the user32.dll error on boot.

According to this, the Radeon 9200 was not supported under Windows 95 .

https://web.archive.org/web/20030313173629/ht … 9200/specs.html

I doubt you will find a driver that works under Windows 95 .

EDIT: Neither was the Radeon 9000 Pro : https://web.archive.org/web/20030607175830/ht … 0pro/specs.html

Reply 5 of 42, by JonnyGators

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Ah well, I gave it a good fight.

Now, it would be nice if I had a way to uninstall this ATI garbage that I can't seem to disable so I can make the boot error go away.

Reply 6 of 42, by JonnyGators

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Figured that out....rename the file that's bitching.

Reply 7 of 42, by darry

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JonnyGators wrote on 2020-07-25, 21:09:

Figured that out....rename the file that's bitching.

I may be wrong, but you may have better luck with the Radeon 8500/9100 as they came out when Windows 95 was still supported, I believe . Maybe even the 9000 had Windows 95 drivers some point . If you are really motivated, you might try forcing one of thos older drivers on the Radeon 9200 in Windows 95 .

Reply 8 of 42, by JonnyGators

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Those drivers are in the same pack though, I did see them there, and at some point tried them. The drivers themselves apply, the issue seems to be the software. It calls on something in that user32.dll that isn't there. So I get that error when windows boots up, and if I try to change from 16 color to 256, on the reboot it fails to apply the change, I believe because applying the change requires having whatever it needs that it's missing from the version of user32.dll. And then it gets stuck, because it can't back out of the change either, so I have to force the driver back to the generic to clear that loop....but it still gives me an error on boot every time, until I finally gave up and renamed the ati2evxx.exe file so that it would stop running on startup.

Being that Windows 95 itself accepts and applies the driver in the device manager, and the error seems to be related to an outdated version of a library that I can't update without breaking Windows, I get the feeling that if I got an older version of the ATI software, it stands a chance of working. Maybe. Possibly.

But 4.1 is the oldest I could find online.

Reply 9 of 42, by Simmerhead

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Hi!

Did you ever resolve this?

I'm having the exact same problem with Win 95 OSR2 and an onboard ATI 3d Rage Pro AGP chip. I've tried a few different driver versions, but the only ones I can find online are from 98/99. They claim to be Windows 95 compatible, but no luck so far.

I get the same error when starting Windows and the ATI driver software calling for user32.dll. The file is there in Win 95, but somehow it's not accepted by the ATI config software.

Simmerhead - Old is gold!

Reply 10 of 42, by acidx

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Fire up regedit and goto :HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion -> Run

Right click and delete AtiPTA

Recommend to do an export of the Reg Hive before doing this.

Good Luck!

Reply 11 of 42, by asdf53

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I have a Radeon 9600 Pro and at first I couldn't get it to work either with the newer Catalyst drivers. Even though the drivers install without any error message and the card shows up correctly in the device manager, I am still limited to a desktop resolution of 640x480 and Direct3D games don't work.

However, I found this older driver version from 2003:

https://www.helpjet.net/Fs-31741585-59851182-78185101.html

Apparently it's from May 15 2003, Catalyst 3.4 (6.14.10.6343), and it supports the following cards:

"ATI MOBILITY FIRE GL 7800" = M7_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4C58
"ATI MOBILITY FIRE GL 9000" = M9_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4C64
"ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9600 Series" = M10_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4E50
"MOBILITY RADEON" = M6_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4C59
"MOBILITY RADEON 7500" = M7_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4C57
"MOBILITY RADEON 9000" = M9_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4C66
"MOBILITY RADEON 9200" = M9Plus_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5C63
"MOBILITY RADEON 9200 " = M9Plus_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5C61
"RADEON 7000 SERIES" = RV100_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5159
"RADEON 7200 SERIES" = R6_ENU_default, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5144
"RADEON 7500 SERIES" = RV200_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5157
"RADEON 8500 SERIES" = R200_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_514c
"RADEON 9000 SERIES" = RV250_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4966
"RADEON 9000 SERIES - Secondary" = RV250_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_496e
"RADEON 9100 SERIES" = R200_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_514D
"RADEON 9200" = RV280_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5961
"RADEON 9200 - Secondary" = RV280_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5941
"RADEON 9200 PRO" = RV280_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5960
"RADEON 9200 PRO - Secondary" = RV280_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5940
"RADEON 9500" = R300_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4144
"RADEON 9500 - Secondary" = R300_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4164
"RADEON 9500 PRO / 9700" = R300_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4E45
"RADEON 9500 PRO / 9700 - Secondary" = R300_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4E65
"RADEON 9600" = RV350_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4152
"RADEON 9600 - Secondary" = RV350_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4172
"RADEON 9600 PRO" = RV350_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4150
"RADEON 9600 PRO - Secondary" = RV350_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4170
"RADEON 9700 PRO" = R300_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4E44
"RADEON 9700 PRO - Secondary" = R300_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4E64
"RADEON 9800 - Secondary" = R350_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4E69
"RADEON 9800 PRO" = R350_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4E48

This driver works for me under Windows 95 OSR 2.5. I can select high resolutions, 32 bit color, and play Direct3D games. Since it also lists the Radeon 9200, you could give it a try. I couldn't get the corresponding version of the ATI control panel to work either, but it's not needed for basic operation. I also couldn't get OpenGL to work with these drivers (Quake 3 and Half-Life refuse to start in OpenGL mode).

I also found this history of older ATI driver versions, very helpful to see which versions came out and when:
https://alt.3dcenter.org/downloads/treiber-radeon.php
The download links do not work anymore, but you can google the file names to see if it's still available somewhere. Keep in mind that there are two versions of the early 2000's ATI drivers, one Win2k/XP version and one Windows ME version, you need the Win ME version. Windows 98 and 95 are not officially supported at all, but the Windows ME driver works in some cases.

Last edited by asdf53 on 2022-02-15, 20:45. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 12 of 42, by leonardo

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As a huge fan of Windows 95, I have to ask you guys why you didn't give up and just upgrade to Windows 98?

I had this exact problem earlier (used a Radeon 9200 for a while) and had to go to Windows 98, as Win 95 is officially unsupported. Then later when Win98 proved unworkable for other reasons, I had to swap the Radeon out because I thought I couldn't use it. You can get Win95-compatible drivers from nVidia for cards ranging all the way up to the GeForce FX series, while as far as I knew ATi topped out at Radeon 8500 (great card, but hard to get).

I'm on the edge of my seat here for one of you to figure out how to fix OpenGL and if Catalyst 3.4 (6.14.10.6343) works on Win95 for all the listed cards. The 9600, 9700 and 9800 cards would likely be the most potent cards one can use on Windows 95, although you'll be missing all the DirectX 9-features.

[Install Win95 like you were born in 1985!] on systems like this or this.

Reply 13 of 42, by asdf53

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leonardo wrote on 2022-02-15, 17:44:

As a huge fan of Windows 95, I have to ask you guys why you didn't give up and just upgrade to Windows 98?

It's just nostalgia - Windows 95 was my first OS and I wanted to see how far I could push it, especially with newer 3D games. It's an interesting combo because almost no one running Windows 95 had a modern 3D card back then, and driver and software support was so limited. It feels like a challenge, doing stuff you aren't meant to do, that's always interesting.

You are totally right about better Nvidia support for Windows 95, I will definitely pick up one of these cards in the following weeks. About the OpenGL support, sadly I have no idea what to do or how to enable it, will just keep trying different driver versions and see if one works. But I am not very hopeful, since these drivers are unsupported after all.

Reply 14 of 42, by leonardo

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asdf53 wrote on 2022-02-15, 21:02:
leonardo wrote on 2022-02-15, 17:44:

As a huge fan of Windows 95, I have to ask you guys why you didn't give up and just upgrade to Windows 98?

It's just nostalgia - Windows 95 was my first OS and I wanted to see how far I could push it, especially with newer 3D games. It's an interesting combo because almost no one running Windows 95 had a modern 3D card back then, and driver and software support was so limited. It feels like a challenge, doing stuff you aren't meant to do, that's always interesting.

You are totally right about better Nvidia support for Windows 95, I will definitely pick up one of these cards in the following weeks. About the OpenGL support, sadly I have no idea what to do or how to enable it, will just keep trying different driver versions and see if one works. But I am not very hopeful, since these drivers are unsupported after all.

You can go all the way up to games as late as Max Payne, but after DirectX 8 it starts to get a little sketchy. I'm thinking if I was you, I would attempt to grab the OpenGL driver files from the latest certified driver package for Radeon 8500, which is the last card officially supported on Windows 95, and combine it with the Catalyst that you got up and running on OSR2. That driver ought to be mature enough to handle any OpenGL that a game that runs on Windows 95 would require, and maybe given the DNA of the Radeon cards would also be compatible with the Radeon 9x00-series.

[Install Win95 like you were born in 1985!] on systems like this or this.

Reply 15 of 42, by asdf53

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That's a great idea! I looked into the older drivers and interestingly, their OpenGL driver (ati09xxx.dll) is much smaller than the newer ones (1.0 MB instead of 2.5 MB), so maybe this is the point where they moved to Windows 98 and dropped Windows 95 support. I will try it tomorrow and report back!

This is the old driver I found:

https://archive.org/details/atiradeon70007200 … 180g01400100iso

Driver disc for Radeon 7000 and 7200 from 2001, also contains drivers for Radeon 8500.

Reply 16 of 42, by asdf53

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I promised to report back and alas, it didn't work. The games crash with a memory violation using the old OpenGL driver. I also tried installing the Radeon 9700 and 8500 drivers from 2001-2002 for my 9600 Pro by faking the PCI ID, but the drivers fail to load and give lots of resource conflicts.

Reply 17 of 42, by leonardo

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asdf53 wrote on 2022-02-16, 20:39:

I promised to report back and alas, it didn't work. The games crash with a memory violation using the old OpenGL driver. I also tried installing the Radeon 9700 and 8500 drivers from 2001-2002 for my 9600 Pro by faking the PCI ID, but the drivers fail to load and give lots of resource conflicts.

How did you separate the OpenGL bits from the rest of the driver? I would have used the Catalyst you found to be working in high-res desktop and D3D-modes, but just backup the OpenGL-specific support files and replace those with the ones from the 8500-driver package. AFAIK you wouldn't change the PCI ID unless you were trying to force the entire driver package.

[Install Win95 like you were born in 1985!] on systems like this or this.

Reply 18 of 42, by asdf53

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I installed the working 9600 drivers, then I extracted just the old OpenGL driver file (atio9xxx.dll) from the 8500 drivers and put it into windows\system. I now had 9600 drivers with just the 8500 OpenGL driver. When that didn't work, I tried force installing the whole 8500 driver package by spoofing the PCI ID, but that didn't work either, Windows refuses to use these drivers. No wonder it didn't work, but it was worth a try.

Reply 19 of 42, by leonardo

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Wow... the previously linked driver confirmed working on Windows 95 OSR2 and a Radeon 9200 / 9600 Pro / 9700 Pro! Haven't tested OpenGL yet, but will report back. Even with just D3D, this is a huge win for some higher-end Windows 95 configs!

Last edited by leonardo on 2022-10-02, 17:57. Edited 1 time in total.

[Install Win95 like you were born in 1985!] on systems like this or this.