G-400 + 3D games = won't work

[Happypants]

How do I get Quake III, Kingpin, Half-Life, etc to work with this card? I have the G-400 dual head, latest drivers, upgraded everying, blah, blah, blah, and none of my 3D games will now work. What gives? I don't believe the latest drivers incorporate OpenGL. Any hints, tips, etc would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[Gurm]

You need to elaborate the blah blah blah part. Also, what did you have BEFORE for a video card? Oftentimes there's stuff left over. Give us more info, and we can be more helpful.

- Gurm

[Happypants]

By blah, blah, blah, I mean that I have upgraded every driver for all my hardware. Before I had the Asus V-3800 TnT2. It worked great, but I need to test on the G-400. I did delete everything associated with that card (regedit, add/remove programs, etc.). I have a PIII 450, 384 megs Ram, an SB Live!, an Asus P2B-S motherboard (U2W SCSI). I've installed the latest drivers for the G-400, and the beta 2 icd for win98 off of Matrox's site. I just can't get any 3D games working. What else do you need, let me know and I'll post it asap since I would really like to enjoy this card if it's worth it. I have heard good things, too bad as of yet I can't experience them.

[Kruzin]

You do not need or want the beta2 ICD. That was for the G200 and Powerdesk 4.51. All drivers for the G400 have always had the ICD built in.

Get rid of that. I suggest using the matox clean util (available at murc), and do a fresh install of the 5.13 drivers for starters....

[Kruzin]

OK...I couldn't spot the uninstaller at murs....but here it is at Matrox...

ftp://ftp.matrox.com/pub/mga/utils/un_513.zip

This will clean your registry of all the stuff that's in there, so you can start fresh, without the G200 ICD in there...

[Happypants]

Ok, I did that. I ran the uninstaller and reset up the card with the 5.13 drivers off of Matrox's site. This did not cure the problem. When I lauch Quake III I get an error "Could not load OpenGL subsystem". What am I doing wrong? Shouldn't the OpenGL drivers be installed when installing the video card drivers? Am I just an idiot?

[Kruzin]

Yes, the OGL drivers should also be loading.
How did you install the drivers? Did you use the setup program, or just point device manager to the location of the driver files?

If the latter, run the setup program.

Next thing to check would be a couple basic BIOS things. Make sure if there is an option for "assign IRQ to VGA", that it is enabled. If there is an option for boot order pci/agp or agp/pci, make sure AGP is first. Also try setting your AGP aperture size to 256 meg (regardless of how much RAM you actually have).

If that all checks out, look for IRQ conflicts. G400 should have an IRQ to itself, with only pci steering sharing that IRQ.

[Happypants]

I did setup the card using the setup.exe utility from the drivers, AGP aperature size already at 256, primary boot device listed as agp/pci, my SB Live! is sharing IRQ 11 with the video and pci steering. There is no option in my Award bios (Asus P2B-S) to reserve an IRQ for my video. I am unable to change my IRQ's. What else?

[Kruzin]

You can control the IRQs with all P2Bs. One of the PCI slots will share an IRQ with the AGP slot, so assigning that PCI slot an IRQ will assign that same IRQ to the AGP slot. That being the case, you may need to relocate the Live! to a different PCI slot in order to get it on a different IRQ.

On my vanilla P2B, it's PCI1 that shares with AGP. Any card that goes into PCI1 will have to share an IRQ with the G400. So my PCI1 is left empty (and blocked by the fan I mounted on the G400). I don't know for sure that's the same PCI that shares on the -S model. I also know that the on-board scsi of the -S will always share with one of the pci slots. But again, I'm not sure which one.

Then, there's the possabilty that it's nothing like this at all. How have you configured the games? What OGL mode did you pick for Q3? Half-Life? Have you tried HL in D3D, and does that work?

[Happypants]

The games won't even take me to the main menu when first launched. Like I said before, Hardware device not found, or a Windows blue screen. I don't even get the chance of configuring the games cause I can't get into them. My system (the way it is configured now) has always functioned fine before with no problems whatsoever. The problems arose when installing the G-400. None of my 3D games will work, 2D games run fine (i.e. Age 1, and Age II). I am at a freaking loss.

[DuRaNgO]

do you still have the "windows" version of opengl.dll in your windows/system file?
jim

------------------
P2-350 o/c 450, BH-6 mobo,128mb pc-100,Mill. G-200 8mb o/c to 215 with g200clk, win98,dx6.1,PD5.13, bios 2.3
THREE BIG FANS (and three little ones)

[Happypants]

yes, I believe it's name is OpenGl32.dll

[Kruzin]

Yea...that would be a good thing to check. Make sure that opengl32.dll and glu32.dll are in the system folder, and the correct versions.

Half-Life at least should let you get to the menus. It doesn't use OGL until you actually load a map. It uses 640x480 2d for the menus. You should be able to get to the video options no matter what...if you can't, I'm stumped.

[Happypants]

they're in there (opengl32.dll and glu32.dll). Let me reinterate, no 3D game will launch. I get either one of the two follow errors: a blue screen, or a "Hardware device not found". This is a clean machine, just set it up last week.

[Happypants]

This is what Quake III does:
I never get into the game:

Q3T 1.07 win-x86 Jul 20 1999
----- FS_Startup -----
Current search path:
D:\q3test/baseq3
----------------------

Running in restricted demo mode.

----- FS_Startup -----
Current search path:
D:\q3test\demoq3\pak1.pk3 (1 files)
D:\q3test\demoq3\pak0.pk3 (834 files)
D:\q3test/demoq3
----------------------
execing default.cfg
couldn't exec q3config.cfg
couldn't exec autoexec.cfg
...detecting CPU, found x86 (P5/Pentium2, MMX)

------- Input Initialization -------
Initializing DirectInput...
Couldn't set DI coop level
Falling back to Win32 mouse support...
Joystick is not active.
------------------------------------
----- Client Initialization -----
----- Initializing Renderer ----
-------------------------------
Initializing OpenGL subsystem
...initializing QGL
...calling LoadLibrary( 'C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\opengl32.dll' ): succeeded
...setting mode 3: 640 480 FS
...using desktop display depth of 16
...calling CDS: ok
...registered window class
...created window@0,0 (640x480)
Initializing OpenGL driver
...getting DC: succeeded
...GLW_ChoosePFD( 16, 16, 0 )
...23 PFDs found
...GLW_ChoosePFD failed
...GLW_ChoosePFD( 16, 16, 0 )
...23 PFDs found
...GLW_ChoosePFD failed
...failed to find an appropriate PIXELFORMAT
...restoring display settings
...WARNING: could not set the given mode (3)
...setting mode 3: 640 480 FS
...using colorsbits of 16
...calling CDS: ok
...created window@0,0 (640x480)
Initializing OpenGL driver
...getting DC: succeeded
...GLW_ChoosePFD( 16, 16, 0 )
...23 PFDs found
...GLW_ChoosePFD failed
...GLW_ChoosePFD( 16, 16, 0 )
...23 PFDs found
...GLW_ChoosePFD failed
...failed to find an appropriate PIXELFORMAT
...restoring display settings
...WARNING: could not set the given mode (3)
...shutting down QGL
...unloading OpenGL DLL
...assuming '3dfxvgl' is a standalone driver
...initializing QGL
...WARNING: missing Glide installation, assuming no 3Dfx available
...shutting down QGL
GLW_StartOpenGL() - could not load OpenGL subsystem