First post, by Dracolich
I have a 16MB TNT2 M64 (Dell OEM, I think) in a AMD K6/233 box with an i430VX mobo. Labels on the back indicate part# 09629U and Rev. A02.
https://www.ebay.com/c/1800418486
I tried it first a while back with WfW 3.11 and the beta driver, and the first time launching Windows I had the message about too little memory to load all of my icons (although the same icons loaded previously on a 4MB Virge/GX), then a few seconds later a GPF popped and hung the whole desktop.
I swapped the cards back and put the TNT2 aside a for a while. About a month ago I felt adventurous again and decided to try it in Win95c (DirectX 8.0). I think I used a 21.x or 24.x driver version, not really sure. I was installing some games and all was going well until I got to Turok2. After choosing install options and it began copying files the screen became horizontally corrupted. I checked Heretic2 and Mageslayer, and got the same thing when the games launched. I checked the 3D screensavers (pipes, maze, flowerbox) and the thumbnail preview causes the same thing.
Once again I swapped the cards back. As a test, I tried Mageslayer with the Millennium II + Voodoo1; it launch with a message that it can't set D3D 640x480 mode, but it still ran in software mode.
Then yesterday I decided to try the TNT2 again with Win98fe (DirectX 8.0), using driver versions 2.xx, 3.xx, 6.xx, and 21.xx. First, the same horizontal corruption appeared, and with the 3.xx driver I found I could solve that by turing off vsync. Now the desktop and 2D stuff worked great. The 3D screensavers work. The ddraw and d3d tests in dxdiag work. But Mageslayer and Heretic2 still hang on a blank screen and I have to blindly press Ctrl+Alt+Del a few times until the computer reboots. In my mobo BIOS I tried enabling "PCI 2.1 Compatibility" but that didn't help.
Am I missing something, such as compatibility with my mobo, or conflict between the Dell OEM and nvidia drivers?
Could it be a bad card? Or such a crappy card that this is how it performs? 😁
It has a couple of light scratches on the back that appear to cross some of the circuit paths. Maybe they're harmless, but maybe not.