One for the Retro Brigade ..Cast your Minds Back please

[Vic]

Bit of a long shot this one, A problem for experienced MURCers with more than a few grey hairs.

I have put my old motherboard in my son's PC. It's an MVP3 chipset board with a K6-2 400 processor and 128 Mb PC100 RAM. Amongst the original cards I have fitted to the Motherboard are an original Mystique 170 and a 12Mb Voodoo2. These all worked fine together on his previous Intel VX chipset board with a P200MMX

Following the board swap I have reformatted the C drive, reloaded windows 98, powerdesk 4.12 (the latest for the Mystique) And VIA's latest 4 in 1 drivers.

My problem is in 2d working, when opening / closing windows, clicking between tabs etc, the picture will start to break up, sometimes going completely half size. Bits of off-size windows will appear around the desktop and eventually the machine will hang.

As the Voodoo2 appears to be working fine. (if you gan get into a game before the 2d goes ga ga!) I am coming round to thinking it's a problem between the Mystique and the motherboard. I've tried changing the card into another slot.

I seem to remember from the long and distant past something about the Mystique not liking the then large amounts of RAM such as 64Mb. I have removed one 64 meg dimm to leave 64Meg but the problem still occurs. I have also tried the previous 4.11 drivers but the break up still happens.

Can anyone rack their brains back and recall having similar problems? I would be most grateful for some more ideas as I have ran out!

Thanks

Vic

[Rags]

Go into your bios and disable "Read around Write"

Rags

[Ant]

Oh now then there used to be a problem between the Mystiques and Voodoos where they would be assigned overlapping memory ranges. The solution was to assign one or the other a different memory range through device manager.

[Vic]

No luck with both these suggestions I'm afraid, The Mystique and Voodoo2 don't share any address space. I changed the BIOS read around write to disabled and it seemed to be OK for a while (typical) but then the desktop started breaking up again. The funny thing is, if I manage to get a 3dFX game running while the 2D desktop is corrupt it runs fine, however, on returning to the Windows desktop on quitting the game the desktop is broken up with off color/ transparent windows as before.

It's suffering symptoms reminiscent of the card being overclocked which it isn't.

Please help, he can play games on the PC but can't do his homework ...an ideal situation some might say!!

Vic

[Ali]

There are several things to look for.

In BIOS, make sure all shadowing is turned off.

Then try it with the Voodoo2 out of the machine, and uninstal its drivers. If it stops now you know its a conflict there.

Have you been to Matrox and downloaded the latest BIOS for your 170?

Is your 170 in a bus master PCI slot?

What DirectX version are you running?

Good luck, and if the card is still in good conition, then you should be able to get it working OK. There is always the possibility that it got a static charge when it was moved from one PC to the other.

Ali

[Vic]

Thanks Ali, more to work on .......

[Vic]

I think I've sorted the problem!

I went into the bios and loaded the default settings. The desktop appears stable.

Now I guess I shall start tweaking till I find out what was causing it to fall over!!

Thanks to all

Vic

[chucky2]

I don't really know much about your card or motherboard, but I can offer a few suggestions:

If the card is an AGP card, make sure you install the VIA AGP driver BEFORE you install the Matrox drivers.

If the card is a PCI card, try NOT installing the AGP driver for the motherboard, even if the board has an AGP slot.

The install sequence would look like this:

Install Win98
Install VIA drivers (leave off AGP driver if card is PCI)
Install DirectX 8.x
Install Matrox drivers.

Hope this helps!

Chuck

------------------

[chucky2]

I almost forgot!

You can also try to replace the contents of the AGP33 directory with the contents of the AGP directory after you unzip the latest VIA 4-in-1 Driver. This may solve your problem, but only if you have an AGP card.

Chuck

------------------

[Vic]

It's the original Mystique, born before AGP was a twinkle.....

[Six Of One]

I really can't remember where but i know i read it nontheless, that older MVP3 boards have troubles with the latest 4 in 1 drivers. But since i can't cement this claim i want to bring it to your attention, if everything else fails.

Regards