RT2000 and W2K

[MarcelZ]

Yesterday I bought the RT2000 package, but after a BIG suprise I was told that this combination wouldn't work with Windows2000.

Can someone tell me if this is true?

if so, when will it be compatible with windows2000

(I did download the latest G400 Flex 3D drivers from matrox-support, but I still have everything in the box, affraid of gettin' a lot of trouble when I install everything)

Should I degrade to win98?

Please help.......

[RoGuE]

No, the RT2000 does not currently work under Windows 2000. Surely you checked the specs of the card before you bought it - for compatibility, etc? If so, you should have known that there is no current support for Windows 2000.

If you want to use the card you will have to install Win98 or WinMe.

Chris.

[Elie]

Congrats on your purchase!

Matrox is working hard to get Win2K drivers for the RT2000 so stay tooned
At the moment, it's best to setup a Win98 or WinME partition aside from Win2000 or even buy another drive and install Win9x on it temporarily, until the drivers are released.

Regards,
Elie

[wkulecz]

The major impact of downgrading to or installing a seperate drive for win9x is they won't support NTFS so your capture drive(s) will have to be reformatted fat32 unless you also shell out for third party NTFS on win9x drivers. I think Doc has been testing some, perhaps he'll pipe in.

If and when Matrox produces RT2000 w2k drivers you can convert your fat32 drives to NTFS and forget about 2/4 GB file limits. I can verify that DV files on fat32 are fine after converting to NTFS. I've done this with single drives and Fasttrack66 RAID0 arrays.

Does the RT2000 do real-time color corrections? RGB, Hue & Saturation, Brightness & Contrast, Gamma? Ulead Media Studio Pro 6 really screwed the pooch here. While it has good color correction video filters, the "options" previews are too small to be very usefull when setting parameters and worse yet, only show the effect of the single current filter, not the whole stack. If RGB, and Brighness and Contrast (which includes gamma) were a single filter it'd be tolerable. I'm doing two camera shoots and the damn auto white balance (no manual override on the D8's I used) means I have to color correct one track to make the cuts look decent -- which is a real PITA with the way MSP6 works :-(

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

The best solution until the Win2K drivers finish testing would be the following;

1. set up a multiboot system with Win2K and Win98SE.

2. install the RT2000 drivers in the Win98SE installation until the Win2K drivers arrive.

3. IF you have a NTFS capture drive set up then I would degrade it to FAT32 for the time being.

4. You can access FAT32 from Win2K but the other direction is problematic. NTFS access by way of the Winternals "NTFS for Win9x" software drivers is impractical because it doesn't give full write speeds and doesn't fully support OpenDML.

5. Even so long captures won't be a problem since the RT2000 handles serial captures internally and transparently. All the segments of the capture appear to Premiere as one large file, even if they aren't.

6. Even under Win98SE the RT2000 is a very powerful piece of code & hardware. It'll be worth the above efforts. Really.

Dr. Mordrid

[MarcelZ]

Thanks people for replying, here's what I will do.
I bought a second harddrive and placed it into my system, on the old one (master) I'm running w2k now, now I'm gonna ghost this one to a file, run partition magic 6.0 to bootmaster my new drive (slave) so I can install win98se on the new drive. (I have to use pm6.0 to bootmaster cause w2k can only be installed as the second OS.)
Afterwards I will re-ghost my old w2k file back to the master and if everything goes well I will end up with a master drive with w2k and a slave drive with win98se.

The main reson for this bypass is the fact that I'm using my system at work so there is to much data and adjusments been done to get the system running as it is right now.

Wish me luck, and I will let you know how it went.

Fingers crossed greetings Marcel

[LrngToFly]

Is Matrox really developing Win2K drivers or are they pulling our leg?

It's unbelievable that it takes this long to get the damn card working under Win2K...

[Elie]

Isn't it surprising that ATI still doesn't have any drivers to fully support Win2K for any of their video cards??

You know why? because Win2K isn't your average OS, every DLL etc. has to be certified from microsoft, you cannot over write any existing system DLL anymore you have to follow the rules Microsoft laid down on all the hardware manufacturer's which is the reason why it's taking them a long time to develop.

I took a Win2K course and trust me, it aint easy.

Regards,
Elie

[MarcelZ]

Howdy folks,
Wow, As I told I installed a second harddrive on which I ghosted a copy of my first drive, then made a nice clean installation of win98 on drive 1 followed by a fresh installation on partition b on this drive 1. As you can guess, lots of problems accured when I ghosted the ghost of my w2k copy back. All .dll routes were corrupted, cause originally the w2k was on partition c and now it's on partiton E, the new harddrive uses D.

Finnaly i formated the hole drive, installed w2k on it (partiton c) ghosted back my copy and again lots of trouble with network roaming profile due to the guid w2k advange serer uses, so again a clean install of w2k.
Deleting my old network profile, made a new profile and bought a second pc on which i installed win98 with my RT2000.

pfoe man, it sure tested my w2k knowledge here, I really hope Matrox will release the w2k drivers so i have something to do again, hehehe.

Good luck to all you matrox developers, and users ofcourse.

[Dr Mordrid]

Win2K is a different bird, that's for sure.

The things I *do* like about it are that it's fairly stable and has the NT core. What I *don't* like is the as-yet unfinished multimedia support and the problems with driver creation Elie mentioned.

As for a *clean* way to dualboot Win98 and Win2K, absent a bootmanager, I'd use the Win2K install floppies. You can find the programs and archives to make these in the x:\Bootdisk\ folder on the Win2K install disk. There are two programs in here you can use to make the install floppies: makebt32.exe, and makeboot.exe. Makebt32.exe is for Windows, makeboot.exe is for DOS.

When I tried to make them the makebt32.exe proggie wouldn't work properlly so I ended up running makeboot.exe from a DOS box. This worked fine.

To use these disks first partition the disk so you have the primary/active partition for Win98 and a logical partiton for Win2K. Now install Win98 to the primary/active partition. Next put disk #1 in A: and reboot the machine. The system should now boot from disk #1 and run the Win2K Setup progam. Once Win2K is installed you will be presented with a bootmenu listing Win98 and Win2K.

Just be sure to tell it to install Win2K to to the partition you've created for it and not C:\ .

Why use the floppies? Because they are used for some recovery modes and they will work if you don't have hardware support for, or have problems with, the bootable CD option.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 11 December 2000).]