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Driver Compatibility


Offler

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@Petr

the system(s) in question were installed using my funky 98SE cd... the autopatcher thread has more info on this CD...

It is listed in Device Manager as AC'97 HD...

No matter though, as I am trying to get a different 98SE cd to try on these... perhaps the name will be different using a "real" 98SE CD?

Any ideas of compatibility with a GeForce FX 5500? Haven't tried yet, but I got this lying around for hopefully a Win98 system...

Edited by DeadDude
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Offler,

Just to relate my experience with that sys AGP Via driver on 9x, using an AGP card I could only get PCI Bus speeds. It would turn off AGP acceleration completely and AGP texturing support was removed. I needed to manally install the AGP from Via's AGP folder, directing Device Manager to the Windows 95 folder within that. That used the via AGP vxd gart driver which reenabled my 8X AGP and AGP texture acceleration.

Perhaps since this is PCI-E we're discussing now, that PCI only sys driver is just what the doctor ordered to let PCI-E graphics cards work on 9x. Good deal! Don't have one myself but it's nice to know that when I get a new PCI-E motherboard and videocard sometime in the future that I might be able to run 98SE on that. I guess I better stick to Via, eh? I've mostly used Via boards anyway.

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Via Boards seems to be good choice. However i dont know if they will keep their MB drivers at this highly compatible standards.

By the way if you are trying to use win98/NT/2k AGP driver on windows 95 it is certain that it should not work. Windows 95 use older Vxd drivers only and it is not compatible with newer drivers - windows 98 is much more compatible...

Also there is one strange myth that windows 9x based systems are not able to use AGP correctly and graphic quality is poor. Many users even dont know that they need driver not only for graphic card, but for motherboard too. each graphic card is almost useless without compatible AGP port driver (if needed).

I know people which have replaced motherboard and graphics for newer ones, and bought XP's because they thought that their hw and os is obsolete :)

Edited by Offler
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Any ideas of compatibility with a GeForce FX 5500? Haven't tried yet, but I got this lying around for hopefully a Win98 system...
Will probably work perfectly fine. Had a 5700 in one of my machines, but had to pull it because it was conflicting a memory range with a special-purpose debugger card I needed to use.
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Geforce FX 5700 had bad driver provided by Nvidia. Mostly trouble with graphics were caused by newer drivers (version 6 and newer). On asus webpage is one older driver (version 5 +-) but it also works best with this card...

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What I meant was that you need to use the Via AGP driver from the Windows 95 folder on Windows 98, 98SE, Me. I've never used Windows 95 so that's not what I was talking about.

98, 98SE, and Windows Me must use the vxd via AGP driver, otherwise AGP read and writes are turned off, AGP Direct X texture acceleration is not available, and PCI bus speeds are used instead.

I'm thinking this was done on purpose to increase compatibility with boards that have poorly designed AGP busses.

In my experience installing the Via AGP on 98, 98SE, Me using the Via 4-in-1 or Hyperion setup never works as it installs that sys driver from the 98SE Via AGP folder which turns off AGP bus use in 9x. So I always manually install the AGP driver from Device Manager (update the Microsoft PCI to PCI thing), directing it to my extracted AGP folder and the Windows 95 folder within it. I choose not to restart when Windows asks. Then I install the Via 4-in-1's, unchecking the AGP checkbox so the installer ignores what is already installed on the system. Then after restarting Windows installs the rest of the updated devices. When asked where a file is I enter C:\Windows\System as that is where the Via setup installed all the needed files (Windows doesn't seem to know that, but everything needed has been put there by Via).

Then I can proceed to install Direct X and my videocard drivers and they will be setup with full AGP bus acceleration (8X in my case).

What is new from this thread is that on newer PCI-E boards we can at least get the cards to work with the normal Via 4-in-1, Hyperion setup that installs the AGP sys driver file (from the normal Windows 98SE folder). We probably will be only using the PCI bus speeds but at least it will run. I imagine that if we tried installing the vxd Windows 95 driver it would not work on PCI-E cards, so we will be stuck with the, normally installed by the Hyperion, sys AGP driver and the PCI bus.

Keep in mind that Direct X 3D acceleration will still work at PCI bus speeds, only we don't get AGP texture acceleration and the AGP reads and writes are turned off. Most games can't tell the difference, but of course it is a slower speed.

All Direct X tests work either with the Sys or Vxd driver, Direct 3D, etc. Only the AGP textures are not available and SmartGart will not run the AGP Reads or Writes using the Sys driver. So we run at AGP Speed 0X, instead of the AGP Speed 8X. But the card will still play games fine using the PCI bus reads and writes. I imagine a tad slower though!

I hope this clarifies what I meant.

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I can confirm that GeForce FX5500 is compatible with 98 SE. I use it with a VIA board (VT8237 southbridge). As mentioned in relation to 5700, bad drivers will probably be your main issue. I don't specifically remember with which driver version, but I experienced gamma-related problems during video playback with at least one of the later Nvidia 9x driver versions. Take Offler's advice and use a 50x driver version for that card (a driver archive is available on the Nvidia site; alternatively, try one of the unofficial Omega Nvidia drivers).

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to Eck: sorry i see now... it has confused me that you was mentioning something about win95...

Via Hyperion pack installed new devices of my Mb correcty, but i was not satisfied using those drivers because they were made not too well. At all manuall installment is better way ...

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Heh, wish I knew precisely which ones to manually install which driver to! I only guessed at the right driver for the AGP because the Windows 95 folder was the only one to have the vxd driver in it.

Besides that I thought the Via setup did a pretty good job. It installs the needed files to where they should go, mostly to the System directory but some files do get put in other places. Then it automatically removes the default Windows devices from Device Manager and when you restart the system Windows finds "new" hardware and starts doing its thing. The only mess up then is needing to point the wizard to the System folder as for some reason it doesn't find a few things automatically.

I see you installed Windows 2000 versions of some of the drivers. I assume that you did that because you found out that the 98 versions didn't work? Really no problem when you installed the 2000 versions? Windows didn't complain or puke? It seems hard to keep 98SE from puking these days, at least for me.

Good report there. Someday when I get a PCI-E super new board I'll know what to try.

I'm going to be experimenting with Linux for the first time. Eyes are tired from all the reading I've been doing. SUSE Linux looks good. I just bought BootIT NG so I'll have more control over things, especially if I wind up buying Windows Vista. I'm planning 98SE, XP, Linux on one hard drive with a second one waiting empty until I can afford Vista.

So I'll be trying 98SE again on this computer as it's going in first. It's running fine in VMWare so I'll cross my fingers about how it'll do on the real hard drive. It's croaked on me with strange IOS errors many times in the last year or so. Haven't got a clue what causes it. Even happened on an Intel SE440BX, so it's not the old "more than 2100 MHz" processor speed problem.

At this point I'd just do Linux but I'd miss my games too much. I know many that I have wouldn't work even with Crossover. So I need both XP and 98SE even if I'm experimenting with Linux.

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to Eck:

Drivers for windows 98 from Via hyperion pack worked correctly, but i looked at the Temp directory in win folder and there i found drivers for Win2k of Hyperion pack.

As i said before, all of them (w98 and w2k drivers) worked perfectly but i prefer higher standardized drivers, because they have some advantages.

Compatibility spectrum of Windows 9x:

So what i know from some sources Win9x based systems are compatible with 16bit and 32bit based computers. That means that it can be installed on 486, Pentium 1 - 4 core systems, almost all AMD processor systems. Multiprocessor, multicore, hyperthreading and 64bit processor systems are out of its range. Are these information correct?

Also i found one piece of hardware - SATA Raid Controller for PCI-E. Manufacturer of this controller was offering "All Windows" driver, which include Windows 98. At this point is interesting that if there is new hardware for new type of bus there also must be some kind of support for the PCI-E bus itself.

There is possibility that if one SATA driver works it is possible that it can work for all other devices which are using same chip.

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I checked out that link....

" On my computers worked with Windows 98 SE the following PCI-E graphics adapters: Nvidia Geforce 6200, Nvidia Geforce 6200 Turbo Cache, Nvidia Geforce 6600 (one only), ATI X300SE, ATI X550. All of them successfuly finished 3DMark2001SE and 3DMark03 "

Maybe we should have a definitive list of win98se compatible graphics cards somwehere (on a website) with best drivers listed? Seems this subject crops up frequently - and it's not getting any easier, AFAICT.

Have a specific question on Nvidia. What's the highest series nvidia compatible card that win98Se (with the unofficial upgrade) can support?

Also not quite sure what you mean by "6600 (one only)". You only tested one, or only one 6600 card worked? I guess the former but it's good to be certain :-)

I ask because I'dd like to go for something more powerful than the 6200 which I'm using.

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to Analada:

Highest version of drivers workable with win9x based systems developed by Nvidia was version 81.98, from december 21st 2005. This driver was causing some trouble with FX 5xxx series cards for them is most suitable version 5.

Highest drivers for ATI cards (including serie Radeon X) were beta drivers for windows ME, officially last drivers were Catalyst 6.2 for Radeon 9800 as highest card and X serie is not supported.

At this point may be interesting that new types of drivers are currently available - Vista drivers. One driver has 100Mb. I shall download them and test them on win9x. but i dont think it shall work.

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to Analada:

Highest version of drivers workable with win9x based systems developed by Nvidia was version 81.98, from december 21st 2005. This driver was causing some trouble with FX 5xxx series cards for them is most suitable version 5.

Highest drivers for ATI cards (including serie Radeon X) were beta drivers for windows ME, officially last drivers were Catalyst 6.2 for Radeon 9800 as highest card and X serie is not supported.

At this point may be interesting that new types of drivers are currently available - Vista drivers. One driver has 100Mb. I shall download them and test them on win9x. but i dont think it shall work.

Thanks. As I said, I'm using a 6200 and would like to know how far above that one can go, sticking with Nvidia.

As for Vista drivers on a win98SE machine - wow you are ambitious! :-) But IMHO it might be better to avoid such drivers for win98SE, though it will be interesting to see what results you get! If you get a result at all, that is. Do post back - especially after you've tried playing back some audio-visual clips and movies.

One of the reasons for the enormous file size (100MB) is that to get MS Vista compliance, graphics card manufacturers *must* incorporate MS specified "functionality" including content protection. One writer has described this as "DISABLING of functionality".

SEE http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

- and the recently added sticky which is essentially saying, "if you're thinking of a new graphics card or of upgrading in general probably it's going to be better to do it sooner."

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My ATI Radeon x850PRO is fully supported by the Catalyst 6.2 for 9x driver and software. I can even install ATI Multimedia Center 9.08 with the DVD setup.exe downloaded from an XP machine and get the DVD player working fine. The decoder installs with the normal DVD cd checker. It'll check to be sure I have the supported ATI cd in the cd drive, but it will not download the decoder's setup.exe on 9x. But if I point it to the setup.exe I put on the hard drive that I previously saved to a cdr from an XP install, it will use that to install the DVD decoder. Just running the setup.exe alone doesn't work. I must use the ATI decoder cd check installer and direct IT to run setup.exe. The current Cyberlink decoder that is used for XP installs runs fine with MMC 9.08.

Don't know about later versions of the x series, but x850's work. They claim it's a beta driver but it works perfectly. I get the ATI Control Panel, WDM drivers, Smartgart, the whole works.

The previous Catalyst 5.9 also includes the beta driver for the x850, for those that prefer the older driver. However, the automatic setup does not work in 5.9. You've got to run the installer then let it tell you it didn't find a supported product, run the WDM setup from the folder it left behind, then update the display adapters from Device Manager using Have Disk and directing it to the folder with the beta driver. Gotta pick it from a list. Try not to pick the wrong one! Then you run setup for the Control Panel. You won't get Smartgart with the 5.9's. MMC 9.08 installs perfectly as above. Gotta install the DAO thing first for MMC either way.

No reason to use the 5.9's though. The 6.2's work fine and setup does it automatically.

You have to check the Autoexec.bat in sysedit with ATI on 9x to be sure it sets up the path statement correctly. If you already have a Path statement there, it messes it up by doubling up on things. So edit that before restarting following the driver installation.

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to Analada and Eck:

i have taken a look at catalyst 6.2 and it supports up to Radeon X800 and older cards of X series.

Those Vista drivers didnd work indeed, but they are not so far from new "lower compatible" 2k drivers... They are very similar. They need Framework 2.0 to work and i was able to fool some installers of this package - some parts especially control panel installed but they didnt work (or at least i dont see any difference now)

also it seems that Registry entries between windows 98, 2000 and Xp are not so different. I was able to install Ati Control panel for windows XP without any error during install and using of it. It works correctly. (maybe KUP is helping here). Vista based control panel is installed too and it is active in background althought i really dont know if it does sometning. i try some benchmarkings...

Also if possible i avoid installation of all systems above windows 2000. Microsoft really forgets that OS means Operating system and its function is to edit, view, and manipulate with files and applications in unified and compatible software environment. Xp has cut off one type of line, and Vista is too different to be compatible.

edit:

It seems that some of components that i installed today is affecting graphic quality in positive way. I have installed NetFramework 2,0 and part of Vista Driver - catalytist control center (it works but it is impossible to open its window). i also try control centers for other windowses and check the difference.

Edited by Offler
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