First post, by JonnyGators
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.