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Slot 1 HP motherboard with onboard Matrox MGA G200 Windows 98 SE driver issue

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First post, by TonyStark

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Hello all! This is my first post to this forum and as far as I can tell, this is an amazing site!
On a retro build I recently put together, I have an HP motherboard with Intel 440ZX chipset, Slot 1 Pentium !!! cpu @ 500Mhz, 128MB SDRAM (dimm) and an onbard Matrox MGA G200 graphics chip with 8mb of ram. I'm facing the following issue...
I've installed Windows 98 SE on it and after installing all the drivers, when I install VGA drivers and restart the system, the PC freezes with scrambled colors on screen, or may reboot, or very rarely show a blank screen. This does not happen with Windows 2000. The latter is rock solid. Has anyone faced this kind of issue before ? is there anything that I can check in order to resolve it ?

The hardware on the system is the following

  • Intel P3 @ 500 MHz Slot 1
    128MB SDRAM Dimm
    On board crystal audio sound chip
    Adaptec 2940UW SCSI controller
    Yamaha CDRW 16/10/40 SCSI
    Creative DVD Encore DVD-ROM drive
    Seagate 10GB HDD
    Realtek 1Gbit NIC
    Creative DXR2 PCI card for DVD decoding
    Iomega ZIP drive 100MB IDE
    3.5" Floppy Drive

Thank you in advance for your help. Please let me know if you need any further information regarding the system

Reply 1 of 12, by dionb

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Sounds like a PnP resource conflict. Who's managing PnP resources, BIOS or OS?

Also, VGA is generally the second driver you want to install (after motherboard chipset), doing it after all the others is asking for problems.

In any event I'd remove all non-essential cards (SCSI, NIC, MPEG decoder) and try again. Odds are that will work. Then add the other cards one by one. Possibly it will all work that way. If not, you'll at least know where the conflict is.

Reply 2 of 12, by Horun

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Which Matrox driver version are you using ?

Hate posting a reply and have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. 🤣 Second computer a 286 12Mhz with real IDE drive ! After that came 386, 486, Pentium, P.Pro and everything after....

Reply 4 of 12, by TonyStark

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dionb wrote on 2020-11-08, 16:28:

Sounds like a PnP resource conflict. Who's managing PnP resources, BIOS or OS?

Also, VGA is generally the second driver you want to install (after motherboard chipset), doing it after all the others is asking for problems.

In any event I'd remove all non-essential cards (SCSI, NIC, MPEG decoder) and try again. Odds are that will work. Then add the other cards one by one. Possibly it will all work that way. If not, you'll at least know where the conflict is.

If not mistaken I've set it to be handled by the BIOS. I will try the other solutions you've proposed as well and I will let you know

Reply 5 of 12, by TonyStark

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@dionb I have tried what you said, all resources handled by bios, clean install on Win98, chipset drivers, VGA drivers and the problem persists. The drivers are installed the colors are good, what I notice is some graphical anomalies on the top border of each window. Then the system freezes or restarts

Reply 9 of 12, by TonyStark

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Yes. I think I've solved it. I've switched the BIOS' PNP OS option to true and then I also selected that the system should update the system configuration. So far no artifacts and no freezes/crashes. I don't think that is that odd, considering the age of the machine it's just that I haven't faced a similar issue before with similar hardware.
Like dionb said, most likely an IRQ conflict caused it.
In any case this happens again I will let you know.

Thank you again for your help.

Reply 11 of 12, by TonyStark

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Unfortunately, i was wrong. It crashed after 10 minutes of use. In safe mode, the system shows no conflicts.... I think I'll try step by step confirmation, to check it out abd let you know. If by the way yoy gjt an udea, gladly il hear it.

Reply 12 of 12, by TonyStark

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I don't know If there is another way to check it, since I haven't involved my self into old hardware for quite some time and I don't remember all the details when we use to check for issues like that.

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