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GeForce 6200 PCI and 486

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First post, by StickByDos

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I tried a PNY GeForce 6200 PCI on a 486DX2-66 with UMC881 chipset

Screen stayed deseperatly black but listening to the sound of beeper and hd, all worked like gf6 was correctly initilized

I joined the result of lspci -v under linux

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Reply 1 of 10, by 5u3

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Probably doesn't work because it doesn't get any I/O ports assigned.

Reply 2 of 10, by h-a-l-9000

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> Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled] [size=128K]

1+1=10

Reply 3 of 10, by StickByDos

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I made the GF6 pci working on t2p4 with 430HX
Epansion rom at unassigned still exist

No problem, I just can't make direct3d working, win98 crash when I try direct3d 7 or 8 games. Maybe it will work better if I reinstall win98. The install cd has drivers even for win95 and nt4.

What is the best driver with win98 ?

Edit: Direct3D 7 works, it's 8 who crash

Last edited by StickByDos on 2006-12-13, 20:21. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 4 of 10, by 5u3

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Ok, the missing I/O ports don't seem to be important, since it also doesn't need any on the HX board.

Some other reasons that could prevent the card from working on the 486 board:

1) The mainboard BIOS is unable to reserve enough memory for the VGA ROM. Your GF6200 has a 128K BIOS, but older cards typically only had 32K or 64K ROMs.

2) The card needs a busmaster PCI slot to work properly. 486-era boards usually don't provide busmastering for all PCI slots (often only one of them can do it).

3) The mainboard is unable to provide power according to PCI specs. Another thing: PCI cards work with 3.3V or 5V (or both) signalling levels, normally the slots have notches to prevent insertion of the wrong type of cards, but these may be missing on very old boards.

4) Buggy mainboard chipset or BIOS. On 486 and early Pentium boards, the PCI implementation is usually quite bad. Intel needed three revisions to get it right on their Saturn chipset, and other chipsets are not much better. PCI (and ISA-PnP) was a nightmare back in the mid-90s, that's why many people kept their old machines until better chipsets were available.

Reply 5 of 10, by StickByDos

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On The HX board, gf6 video bios is mapped between C000-CEDF like with most nvidia's cards

On the 486 board, pci slots have notch for 5V, on the pcb, there is printed:
master card next to the 1st pci slot
GA107 next to the 2nd (CMD 640x PCI Multi-I/O)
display card next to the 3rd
nothing next to the 4th

It can't boot if I install a bus master card in the 2nd slot

In the slot where I installed gf6, I managed to used an usb2 Zioncom Uc 0401

GF6 has notches for 5V and 3.3V like usb2 adapter

I tried to dump mft output:
On System / Overview it said CGA
On Adapters / Video it said Monochrome
It's like vga mode not initialized

I will try to dump memory between C000-CFFF in real mode and to boot a linux kernel with nvdia frame buffer compiled in

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Reply 6 of 10, by StickByDos

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I dumped GF6 bios on HX and 486 with debug

On HX bios ends at CED2:0002

On 486 bios is present but truncated at C800:0000

Is it possible to sofl-load video bios ? I know such program exits to test edited video bios before flashing.

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Reply 7 of 10, by Qbix

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do you have any options with regard with shadowing on your 486 ?

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 8 of 10, by StickByDos

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I have the same option for bios shadow as with all modern award bios

I can't find a bios dumper which work with my card
nvflash, wfflash and NibiTor failed to detect it

There is vgabios which can load video bios but I don't know how it work, some sites say it copy bios file to shadow ram but I don't know if it can work with old chipset

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Reply 9 of 10, by StickByDos

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I managed to dump the bios with nvflash but it was on a nForce3 250GB based system.
NiBiTor idententify this bios as a GF6 agp

I tried to watch nVidia's girls on this system: Dawn, Dusk and Nalu
Dusk was a bit slow and Nalu too slow

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Reply 10 of 10, by StickByDos

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I got the same problem with a Graphic Blaster Exxtreme, 4MB graphic card based on Permedia2

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