Any ETA on Win2K drivers for RT2000

[wkulecz]

Elie,
What is that supposed to mean?
You accusing me of shilling for microsoft?

Them's fightin' words!

I've found a few of the 65K+ bugs, but so far none are showstoppers, and none have caused me even 0.01% of the grief of the Marvel bugs I've encountered over the past year.

We'll see if my opinion changes when I start playing with the Pyro. If Matrox releases W2K drivers and videotools for the G200 Marvel I'll praise 'em if they are good and pan 'em if they aren't.

--wally.

[salacious]

If you want to bitch about a certain Manufacturer, you should bitch about Truevision. I know they are now part of Pinnacle but they released drivers for the Bravado that were only compatible with Windows 95 (not 95B). It wouldn't work if you had Office 97 on your machine. They promisied NT drivers which never appeared. If the drivers messed up and didn't send the video out the video sockets you could try reinstalling your drivers (by hand deleting sections of win.ini etc) but most of the time you had to delete Windows and start again.
These are all problem that my friend had just after he spent 550 pounds (about 800 dollars) on the card. It was a good card which compared well even to Pinnacle DC10. It can do full screen PAL/NTSC up to 7MB/s.

So Matrox are brillant compared to that.

Salacious

[Elie]

Hey wkulecz,

You saw the two smilies right?
I was just kidding, I know Win2000 rocks!

And I hope we see drivers not only from Matrox but from every hardware manufacturer out there, because AFAIK alot of hardware still doesn't support Win2K natively

Cheers,
Elie

[DrMordrid]

The problem is that if Win2K is so solid why are the market analysts raising the alarms about those outstanding issues? I'm sure they have researched them far more than anyone here has.

Dr. Mordrid

[Dr Alien]

Elie,
What's your deal man? You call me a b*tch to microsoft then say 2000 rocks? I'm curious. I think what you, I assume, consider innocent and playful sarcasm comes across as lighting the flamethrower and pulling the trigger. Now hard feelings if it's all in good fun.

I happen to use the Mac at work all day long and after that (and I do like and respect Apple) coming home to 2000 is like heaven on earth. Imagine sitting and watching as printing your 300dpi photoshop image renders your wonderful G4 useless while it prints. God d*mn. It took them 10 revisions to get multitasking!!!! WTF! So the fact that win 2000 is overall a very solid system that can do 10 things at once without a burp makes me want togive Bill Gate a big friggin hug!
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the doctor who is also an alien

[Elie]

No hard feeling
It's all in good fun Dr. Alien, but I think you guys are taking this a bit toooooo seriously and it's time to relax take a deep breath and chill

Win2000 maybe a great OS (I'm running the RC version) but I think it needs a service pack or two before anyone can take it seriously.

Elie

[wkulecz]

Well the Windows 2000 honeymoon is definitely over! The TNT2 card I got to be secondary display sucks at 1600x1200, although it looked OK on my inital install (tested with 17" at 1024x768), when moved to my 21" the quality was much much worse that the Xpert98 card I had been using on win98, which while not great was acceptable. So back it goes!

Will a G200 Millenium work as secondary with 24 or 32 bit color at 1600x1200 with at least a 70Hz refresh? Nobody around here seems to carry these any more, I hate to order something unless I'm sure it supports what I need. It is on in the HCL.TXT file as having support for multimon, but I've so far found most of the built-in video card drivers are really lame. The TNT2 driver appeared to support what I needed but too bad the 2D quality is terrible at rirez.

When I enabled the second processor I started seeing many win9x apps start crashing or locking up much more frequently. Now since they all crashed from time to time under win9x I'm not expecting W2K to fix bad code but SMP sure seems to expose a lot more bugs!

When Thumbs+ crashed, which has never given the slighest bobble under NT4SP3-5 there is a real problem. I'll revert to uniprocessor and then go back to the inital single video card setup I started with if necessary to sort things out if the problem is video drivers (although all are from the distribution CD) or SMP causing the problems.

I haven't tried photoshop under the dual video card SMP setup, but on a single processor with single video card (an old virgeVX card) I did use it for a real 3 hour job and produced a print without incident. This was largely responsible for my initial favorable comments.

Win2K did initially exceed my expectations, but then I wasn't expecting much!

I'm still amazed that I've not had a single issue with Plug and Play despite much board swapping. Still got some of Win9x's stupidity where it thinks its a "new" card if you put it in a different slot so its not perfect, but still a major improvement over my PnP bad experiences under win9x.

--wally.

[Dr Alien]

I have 2 radius 19" monitors with my primary display run by a CL Geforce and the secondary by Millenium G200 PCI I bought direct from Matrox (the only way I could find one). I works very well in 98 and 2000. You can even install the latest 2000 drivers and get the powerdesk features for your secondary display!

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the doctor who is also an alien

[DrMordrid]

wkulecz:

Did you do an overlay Win2K installation? PC Mag's labs are strongly recommending not doing this but instead doing a bare drive install of Win2000 and all apps.

If you remember this also was a problem with many Win95 to Win98 upgrades.

Dr. Mordrid

[wkulecz]

Doc M,

No I did a clean install to a virgin HD after booting the w2k CD from the CDROM drive. I started with only a single CPU. After I got my critical stuff installed and tested (Nikon Slide scanner, Umax flatbed, HP photosmart printer, photoshop, and other must have apps from my NT4 box), I upgraded to dual CPU as described in MS knowledge base article. Everything went smooth other than difficulty finding a video board that worked as secondary at 32-bit color and 1600x1200. Returned the TNT2 clone as its 2D quality was total garbage at this rez. A Voodoo3 2000PCI is working fine now and looks better than the Xpert98 I was running on win98 strictly for dual monitors.

The point of the exercise was to consolidate a win98 box with dual monitors I used strictly for photoshop with my NT box I have used for five years for everything else. I'm getting married again soon and can't have computers everywhere any more :-(

Only had to junk one app, my newsreader, newsXpress. This is a multithreaded app that was prone to crashing under NT4 and is no longer being developed, but it was mostly "it crashes if you do this--so don't do that!" type of problems. Under win2k it was totaly unusable. Xnews seems a capable replacement now that I've gotten used to it.

No bobbles at all with photoshop and the NT4 driver for the scanners and HP photosmart printer appear to work as before.

The Thumbs+ problem seems to be a multithreading bug that only happens with several "background" database thumbnail updating operations in progress. No problems if I limit it to just one.

I'm amazed at how well PnP works on w2k I've gotten downright bold just trying stuff to see what works, is lame, or doesn't. I expected this ot be a test install and a re-install "for real" latter, but looks like this is gonna simply evolve into the main system I'll use for the next five years (other than desktop video).

The hibernation feature is great!

DirectCD is broke, but EZCD creator deluxe 3.5c works about as good as it ever did (not 100% problem free under 9x or NT) if you install it with the "pre-patch"

So on balance I've not lost anything of real consequence and gained quite alot so far.

I'm ready to try the w2k drivers for the G200Marvel in this system as soon as available. That's how bold I've become with the PnP of W2K!

I sure hope Matrox uses the standard "add new harware" as opposed to their current mis-placed creativity in the powerdesk install.


Dr Alien,

Does your G200 run at 1600x1200 32-bit color?
You said it was secondary, but didn't mention depth and rez.

--wally.

[wkulecz]

To come to closure, in case anyone cares, for me, W2K is a major improvement over win98!

I took my old win98 system, added a second drive and did a virgin install of W2K dual boot to NTFS.

Installed the Pyro firewire card and booted into Win98. PnP, drivers and Visual Studio 4
installed without a hitch. Ran thru the tutorial -- WAV volume set to zero at start of each "chapter" -- major annoyance!!

Did my first capture, worked fine.

Made an VCD mpeg1 with "gomotion" appeared to work but when played back in media player, audio only with black screen :-(

Tried to write the clip back to tape -- win98 locked up!

Second verse, booted into W2K this time, PnP found the Pyro and installed drivers and the "Imaging device". Couldn't find the camcorder. Deleted the drivers and tried again -- installed the Pryo and camcorder but not the "imaging device" for DV contol. Third time was a charm.

Fired up VS4 repeated the above.

Mpeg played back fine typical VHS dub quality MPEG though :-(

Output to tape recorded fine.

So same hardware and same software *except* for OS and lowest level drivers. Worked in W2k out of the box, although this was my first and so far only PnP bobble under W2K. Win98 was a typical mess of weird things not working right. Admittedly, ADS strongly suggests Win98SE or "gold" but they claim it works under plain 98.

VS4 is down in the Videowave and Avid Cinema class. IMHO best feature set, by far! but worst user interface of the bunch. Add VS4 feature set to Avid user interface and it'd be a NLE package I could recommend to my artistic but computer phobic friends.

--wally.

[jpb]

wkulecz - am I missing something? Did you say there is a way to capture video on W2K with a Marvel?

I am more or less locked into W2K, and have only been able to use my Marvel to watch TV. It would be great to do even some primitive recording with it.

[wkulecz]

Yes, you've missed something. I've not tried my Marvel on W2K. Waiting for official video tools and driver set to be released.

--wally.