To all you Windows2000 gurus

[welshbloke]

I have installed W2K as a dual boot on my G400 Max system without any real problems although I have only looked at it running TFC in D3D which although slower seems to run cleaner.

Someone mentioned WinonCD 3.6 does that even work on NT properply?

And on a closing note I have just installed Millenium Beta 2 Win98s new successor maybe this will be your next step and not W2K it is supposedley built for Gamers ... I did notice 2 features of note though one being the Home network setup for sharing internet connections and the inclusion of Directplay Voice (Didnt work though)

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PIII 450 128mb win 98 sp1 G400Max PD 5.41 Abit Be6 motherboard

[cswan]

Well, tried enabling ACPI but the only thing it gained me was the hibernate ability.

I confirmed that by running the Direct3d tests in dxdiag that my D3D stuff is working properly. My OpenGL, though, does not work at all--when I attempt to run the Windows screensavers it gives several memory violation errors, and then runs the screensaver in software mode.

I _am_ using the Matrox beta drivers, but I've heard several people mention "Use the Microsoft drivers!" Um, there _are_ no Microsoft drivers for this card. In the list of available cards, the closest card would be the Millenium G200--and since the G400 seems to different from that card, I doubt that driver is going to work. Yes, I've deleted the videocard several times and reinstalled the Matrox drivers via setup.exe. Matrox diagnostic reports that busmastering is working properly, and the card has an IRQ.

The ICD in the beta drivers _does_ work, right? I tried replacing it with the Win9x version of g400icd.dll, but obviously it didn't work

Can anyone help me here? I'm really pulling my hair out on this one. Gurm says that in general problems are with hardware--not with Win2K, or the drivers. Ummm...possible, but
what hardware do I have here that is preventing solely OpenGL from working??

FWIW, here's my configuration:
Celeron550,128 RAM, Aureal A3D 1.0 card, BT958 SCSI, 3c905b ether on Abit BE6 mobo. 32Meg vanilla G400 running beta W2K drivers on W2K OEM 2195.

[Gurm]

Ok, ACPI gets you hardware polling (invisible to you) and Hibernate support (visible) as well as a few other tweaks (better Plug'n'Plop, etc.), but...

The OpenGL screensavers and the Matrox Beta drivers are good and broken. Don't judge OpenGL on that. Try running a good OpenGL test, like Glaze, or GL Exercizer, or Quake...

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[cswan]

Thanks Gurm--I'll give it a shot. GL screensavers are usually the place I start--would think that the tiny GL featureset that they support would be the easiest thing to support, but...

Any chance you have a URL for GL exerciser? I'll try the others, but couldn't find a reference to that bench anywhere.

[Gurm]

3d Exercizer is from Intergraph. You have to run a search at intergraph's site though.

The OpenGL screensavers are bad in general because they use Direct3D mode change calls and then open OpenGL "windows" on the Direct3D context. Icky.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[cswan]

Well, here's my report. Nothing much worked, though.

Screensavers: I believe I was actually wrong--some of the OpenGL screensavers _do_ appear to work, but they all give the 'new' W2k GPF box before and after they execute. By 'new' GPF box I'm referring the the two windows that pop up saying:

Memory "0x00000000" in "0x0000000" could not be "read"

and another one after that giving a real memory address. So, strangely, some OpenGL screensavers _did_ work after those error messages...others just remained black.

DoomGL/HereticGL: Ran, but had massively corrupted graphics--game was unplayable.

Quake: Couldn't get it to run...but I might have been forgetting some trick needed to get Quake using OpenGL in the first place.

Quake2: Software mode ran fine (duh), but would not switch to OpenGL mode (console errors.)

Heretic2: Since it's based on the Q2 engine, I didn't think it would run--but, using the G200OpenGL setting, it did run--albiet with corrupted textures, like GLDoom.

Quake3: Machine freezes when 'id' logo is animated on screen (never actually animates logo, though the sounds play.) Yes, reinstalled q3 to make sure.

Trails (Direct3d): Ran, but seemed buggy...massive slowdowns, and would sometimes crash.

Drakan: Hah--this game actually ran...but, if I rememeber correctly, it's using Direct3D. Didn't play for very long, so can't say anything for the stability.

GLBlocks (simple OpenGL-in-a-window program): Ran fine, but got the GPF errors after it exited.

For the things that didn't crash with the GPF message, the machine would rip directly back to the desktop with no warnings of any sort. Thinking that behaviour did look similar to a bad hardware setup, I tried the following things:

[no, the card was not overclocked]
Reboot, set CPU to normal speed of 366: No help.
Reboot, switch AGP to 2/3, so it's running at normal speeds: Nope.
Reboot, decrease the AGP aperture from 256 to 128: Nope.

At all times the AGP mode was running at X2...I doubt this was the issue, though. Win9x runs at X2, 100AGP, 173core speed (on G400) just fine.

I dunno...I'll probably just give up at this point until some better drivers come out.

[Gurm]

I'll almost guarantee it's still a hardware issue. Go over to Matrox Hardware and post there, with a full list of your IRQ's and settings, and they'll get you sorted.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.