Small success on a disasterous day ...
- From: "Peter H. Wendt" <peterwendt@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:13:41 +0100
Hi !
This day was not one of my best, since I'd had to put my girl-friend into hospital. Things aren't running as supposed and more problems show up.
On return from this sad event I decided to bring up my spare 95A with Win98SE. It has a stock P90 platform, 128MB ECC RAM and a Seagate 18GB drive (SCA80 with U/W adapter) attached to the Corvette SCSI, TSST DVD burner on the Patriot and a 3Com Etherlink III into the network.
(Same setup like on AOL-GATE)
Ünals SCSI driver works fine and so does the XGA-2 driver.
I'd managed to get the AVM B1 Active ISDN card working and even the Reply Vibra-16 soundcard works but only with IRQ 5, DMA 1 / 1 using the same DMA for low and high transfers. The basic setting with IRQ 5, DMA 1 and 7 like on AOL-GATE did not work for whatever reason. It might be a card hardware failure, since that was my "museum card" I'd put aside after running into problems with it. Since I'd had a second card that worked with no problems I didn't delve deeper into the nature of the problem - if any.
The XGA-2 main disadvantage is the 1MB VRAM, which allowes only 800 x 600 in High Color or 1024 x 768 in 256 color mode. The ATI GUP I have in AOL-GATE allowes 1024 x 768 in High Color. But the card is obviously dying. Even after capacitors replacement and cleaning it from any trace of dust the picture is unstable (distortions running along the characters for instance). It is a BIOS 1.0 version (rather old) and the distortions appeared about half a year ago. Getting another one is ... well ... pretty much unlikely.
So I decided to experiment with the only 2MB VRAM card I have: the Cirrus Logic Short 1MB SVGA with the CL-GD5248-80 chipset I'd upgraded with a pair of piggy-pack soldered chips to 2MB.
After swapping the cards I ended up with no video signal.
The screen came up about half the way loading the reference diskette but showed no picture, however turned on and -obviously- synced.
I entered blindly a "Y" after the disk loading stopped and twice "Enter" when disk operation stopped again. (That did the auto-config ...)
After the reboot the picture comes up normal.
On loading Win98SE the system dropped back to VGA mode. Running a manual hardware install with the Cirrus Logic generic driver works fine - even though the system claimed that the driver does not match the hardware.
I generously ignored that error message .... and ... the system comes up in SVGA mode with 256 colors. Display properties allowed to alter resolution and color depth to 1024 x 768 and Hi-Color and after a short phase of confusion (and some odd patterns on the screen) the display turns into 16-bit color mode.
The rather low refresh of 60Hz is *a bit* irritating on a tube display, but does not matter for the TFT. However the driver seems to have some downsides. "Loosing pixels" is one of them: sometimes after closing or moving windows there are some left-over artifacts on the screen, but using the "show desktop" button on the command bar fixed that so far.
The card and driver are also slower than on the ATI GUP and on Ünals XGA-2 driver. All screen operations take its time and the "Solitaire Test" takes about 2 minutes to clear the stack of cards.
All in all the card *is* sub-optimal, but as long as it can be used as a substitute for an ATI GUP on a TFT ... well ... why not trying it ?
--
Very friendly greetings from Peter in Germany
http://members.aol.com/mcapage0/mcaindex.htm
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