Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 16:26:28 -0700 (PDT) From: "William R. Somsky" <somsky@dirac.phys.washington.edu> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Trouble w/ Number Nine Motion 771 -- Any Help? Message-ID: <199609122326.QAA27135@dirac.phys.washington.edu>
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I've just recently got a new system for running FreeBSD for Unix work and Win95 for games. Based on the information gathered from various FreeBSD sources, I got a Number Nine Motion 771 video card, since it seemed to be one of the premier choices of FreeBSD'ers. However, I'm having some trouble with it, and I'm not sure where the trouble is coming from, so I'd like any input from those of you who have one, esp. those who are using it both for FreeBSD unix and for Win95 games. 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 2000LP SCSI disk, Toshiba 3701B SCSI CD-ROM, IOmega SCSI ZIP drive, and a Conner 340MB IDE disk. The difficulty I'm having is in Win95 so far (please don't tune me out just yet), since I haven't got XFree86 set up yet. However, I'm worried that the trouble might be indicative of a hardware problem w/ the card or my setup, and not just limited to Win95 (and I'd like to have that work right for games anyway). 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've tried turning the "System: Performance: Graphics" setting all the way to "None" -- that didn't stop the hangs. I tried setting all the BIOS settings to their "slow-but-safe" modes -- that didn't stop the hangs. I tried turning off the video BIOS shadowing -- that didn't stop the hangs. Nothing I do seems to help. Is this indicative of a hardware problem? Software? Setup? (I've tried checking IRQ's, etc, but haven't tried pulling the SB16 out yet.) Or is this just the way it is w/ Motion 771's? (Hard to believe they would have such a sever problem -- it's gotta be something else -- doesn't it?) Can anybody give me any clues/leads to what's going on? Surely, with the Number Nine's being as popular among FreeBSD'ers as they seemed, some of you out there must have Motion 771's and succumbed to the temptation of having a small Win95 partition of to the side to play games on, so would have some experience w/ it's behavior under Win95. _Is_ this typical behavior for a Motion 771? Do I need to: Fix my setup? Get different drivers? Replace the card? Give up on the Motion 771? Give up on Win95? (But my games!) Please, any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance, Bill Somsky ________________________________________________________________________ William R. Somsky somsky@phys.washington.edu Department of Physics, Box 351560 B432 Physics-Astro Bldg Univ. of Washington, Seattle WA 98195-1560 206/616-2954
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