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g200 mms won't work - why?
Howdy:
I've got a 2nd-hand G200 MMS (quad) board that I can't get to work. I've been talking to the tech support people in the Matrox company tech support forums, but have not yet figured out what I need to do.
The short of it is: my available PCs will not boot with the card installed and set as the source of the primary display. I've tried this on both my main machine
Abit BP6, 2 Celerons (PII core), 768meg of memory
G200 MMS quad board
SB64 AWE gold
3Com 3c509 NIC
varying additional video cards (one at a time) including:
ATI Xpert98 (8 meg rage pro) (AGP)
Matrox Millenium II (PCI)
ATI graphics ultra (512k) (ISA)
Running linux (slack 8.0/9.0beta, XFree86 4.2.1/4.2.99-3)
And on another machine:
Dell dimension t700r
700Mhz PII processor, 768 meg of memory
nvidia tnt2 AGP card (tried both with and without)
etc.
(Win98)
If the G200 card is the only graphics card in one of these machines, it will not boot, whether the primary graphics adaptor is set to PCI or AGP. I've tried removing all other cards in the BP6 but still had not luck.
Once, the board produced a flashing cursor in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, shortly followed by the right-hand side of the screen turning bright green, but that's the most impressive thing I've seen. The rest of the time, all that I can see is a screen full of white gobbledegook (If I turn the brightness all the way up to the max). It looks in truth like a signal that is somehow outside the monitors' sync ranges - not that there is a visible image, but rather that some coherent signal is being sent to the monitor but that it's in a format that the monitor cannot parse correctly.
The boot fails before the machine gets around to trying to boot off the floppy drive, even though the floppy is set as the first device in the boot order. Usually the hard drive light comes on for a bit, but that's all that really happens. Unfortunately this precludes me running the matrox hardware diagnostic utility with just the g200 in the machine. When I try and run it with some other video card also installed, the utility pukes after identifying the board as a g200 mms quad dvi board and while trying to load a library.
I've tried flashing the bios with both older (2.7) and current (3.3) versions. I've dumped the pins data and examined it. I used mxinfo from the MatroX files site to dump info from the board, and it turned up this interesting tidbit:
PINS at 7b60; checksum OK.
00: Signature : PIN
02: Size : 64
04: PINS Version: 3.5
06: Last pgm. : 2003-01-04
08: Programmed : 3 times
10: Product ID : 0, America, MultiMon, 0
12: S/N : PAX09819
28: Card version: 607
34: PCB version : 6908-6
48: Mem control : 042450a1
53: Video ctrl : Separate sync on sync out, 0 IRE blank.
56: Base memory : 8 MB
59: Fact.options: DVD FP Link, no VGA output
The text in number 59 implies that my board is not able to produce vga output. This was not mentioned when I bought the board. I don't have any flat panel displays, and I really don't intend to buy them. But if I check on the matrox product page
It tells me that every g200 mms card is digital- or analog-ready.
Based on all the preceding information, I've come to the following suppositions:
(1) The computers won't boot because either
(a) the g200 board expects a response back from a DVI (DVD?) panel that it fails to get.
(b) the g200 board is somehow set to never allow itself to be used as the primary display, so the computer fails to find a primary display and halts.
(c) the board actually is screwed.
(d) the text on the matrox page is not accurate and I really do have a board that can't produce vga output
(2) If (a) or (b) are true, then I need to be able to alter (hopefully) only one or two values in the eeprom to get my board to produce vga output and work as desired.
(3) If (2) is true, then since my flashing the bios did not effect any visible change in the board's behavior, I possibly need a new pins file from a g200 mms quad board NOT set to pure digital output. Possibly it's also something set in the option byte.
So, anyone got a pins file from a g200 mms quad board, or information about what else I could try, or just ideas about the problem in general?
So anyways, thanks for reading my long ramble. I really want to get this card working, but I'm kind of at the end of my rope right now. Any help would be appreciated
Zeke
I've got a 2nd-hand G200 MMS (quad) board that I can't get to work. I've been talking to the tech support people in the Matrox company tech support forums, but have not yet figured out what I need to do.
The short of it is: my available PCs will not boot with the card installed and set as the source of the primary display. I've tried this on both my main machine
Abit BP6, 2 Celerons (PII core), 768meg of memory
G200 MMS quad board
SB64 AWE gold
3Com 3c509 NIC
varying additional video cards (one at a time) including:
ATI Xpert98 (8 meg rage pro) (AGP)
Matrox Millenium II (PCI)
ATI graphics ultra (512k) (ISA)
Running linux (slack 8.0/9.0beta, XFree86 4.2.1/4.2.99-3)
And on another machine:
Dell dimension t700r
700Mhz PII processor, 768 meg of memory
nvidia tnt2 AGP card (tried both with and without)
etc.
(Win98)
If the G200 card is the only graphics card in one of these machines, it will not boot, whether the primary graphics adaptor is set to PCI or AGP. I've tried removing all other cards in the BP6 but still had not luck.
Once, the board produced a flashing cursor in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, shortly followed by the right-hand side of the screen turning bright green, but that's the most impressive thing I've seen. The rest of the time, all that I can see is a screen full of white gobbledegook (If I turn the brightness all the way up to the max). It looks in truth like a signal that is somehow outside the monitors' sync ranges - not that there is a visible image, but rather that some coherent signal is being sent to the monitor but that it's in a format that the monitor cannot parse correctly.
The boot fails before the machine gets around to trying to boot off the floppy drive, even though the floppy is set as the first device in the boot order. Usually the hard drive light comes on for a bit, but that's all that really happens. Unfortunately this precludes me running the matrox hardware diagnostic utility with just the g200 in the machine. When I try and run it with some other video card also installed, the utility pukes after identifying the board as a g200 mms quad dvi board and while trying to load a library.
I've tried flashing the bios with both older (2.7) and current (3.3) versions. I've dumped the pins data and examined it. I used mxinfo from the MatroX files site to dump info from the board, and it turned up this interesting tidbit:
PINS at 7b60; checksum OK.
00: Signature : PIN
02: Size : 64
04: PINS Version: 3.5
06: Last pgm. : 2003-01-04
08: Programmed : 3 times
10: Product ID : 0, America, MultiMon, 0
12: S/N : PAX09819
28: Card version: 607
34: PCB version : 6908-6
48: Mem control : 042450a1
53: Video ctrl : Separate sync on sync out, 0 IRE blank.
56: Base memory : 8 MB
59: Fact.options: DVD FP Link, no VGA output
The text in number 59 implies that my board is not able to produce vga output. This was not mentioned when I bought the board. I don't have any flat panel displays, and I really don't intend to buy them. But if I check on the matrox product page
It tells me that every g200 mms card is digital- or analog-ready.
Based on all the preceding information, I've come to the following suppositions:
(1) The computers won't boot because either
(a) the g200 board expects a response back from a DVI (DVD?) panel that it fails to get.
(b) the g200 board is somehow set to never allow itself to be used as the primary display, so the computer fails to find a primary display and halts.
(c) the board actually is screwed.
(d) the text on the matrox page is not accurate and I really do have a board that can't produce vga output
(2) If (a) or (b) are true, then I need to be able to alter (hopefully) only one or two values in the eeprom to get my board to produce vga output and work as desired.
(3) If (2) is true, then since my flashing the bios did not effect any visible change in the board's behavior, I possibly need a new pins file from a g200 mms quad board NOT set to pure digital output. Possibly it's also something set in the option byte.
So, anyone got a pins file from a g200 mms quad board, or information about what else I could try, or just ideas about the problem in general?
So anyways, thanks for reading my long ramble. I really want to get this card working, but I'm kind of at the end of my rope right now. Any help would be appreciated
Zeke
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