Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 21:41:43 -0700 From: "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@MindBender.serv.net> To: "William R. Somsky" <somsky@dirac.phys.washington.edu> Cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Trouble w/ Number Nine Motion 771 -- Any Help? Message-ID: <199609130441.VAA01511@MindBender.serv.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 12 Sep 96 16:26:28 -0700. <199609122326.QAA27135@dirac.phys.washington.edu>
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>The system consists of: an ASUS P55T2P4 motherboard, Pentium 166MHz
>processor, 32MB RAM, Adaptec 2940U SCSI Controller, Number Nine Motion
>771 video card, Creative Labs SB16 (pre PnP) sound card, HP SureStore
[...]
>My trouble is, that although the video card seems to work OK w/ the
>default drivers that come as part of Win95 (which, by the way, only
>give you 60Hz refresh -- hard on the eyes! -- and won't give you the
>1152x and 1600x resolutions), it doesn't work very well w/ any other
>drivers. With any other video drivers I've tried -- the Hawkeye95
>version 1.something that came w/ the card, the Hawkeye95 version 2.05
>from Number nine's web site, or the generic S3 968 driver from S3's
>website -- the whole system becomes susceptible to hanging! I'll be
>mousing about, doing a things (usually poping up a menu or something
>like that), and the system will just freeze. Complete catatonia. No
>activity, won't respond to anything. This really doesn't sound like
>proper beahvior to me.
I know the default S3 968 driver that came with Windows 95 wasn't very
robust. From what I can tell, mainly because these cards *just* came
out before Windows 95 did.
My Diamond Stealth 64 Video VRAM 3400 (say that three times fast!),
which is based on the same S3 968 chip, won't do any higher than
800x600 with the default Windows 95 driver, unless you like looking at
this really sickly washed-out effect that gets worse the more stuff
you put on the screen.
But, with Diamond's GT drivers for the thing, it works really
excellent under Win 95. I've used it at 1152x864 24bpp, and even
1280x1024 16bpp. Maybe #9's drivers are buggy...
For what it's worth (if you're going to be using Windows), you might
investigate just running Windows NT 4.0 (plus FreeBSD, of course).
These cards are supported without special drivers, and it's *way* more
robust than Windows 95. (On NT 4.0 I can get that card to do the same
1152x864 24bpp, and can go all the way to 1600x1200 16bpp.) Note that
even though NT 4.0 has DirectX, it won't run all the games that Win 95
will.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael L. VanLoon michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
--< Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x >--
NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
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