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Matrox Millenium G450 - Which Win98SE driver?

JonB

JonB

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I have a Matrox G450 on my CP/M transfer machine. It's fine in DOS mode but when launching Windows 98 I get a dialogue box complaining there are system resource clashes, and the GUI runs in the basic 600x400 16 colour mode.

I had a look at the Matrox website but they only list drivers for WinXP and later for the G450.

Is there any alternative driver I can try? I saw an XP driver for the G450_tv card in their legacy driver section but I'm not sure I want to go ahead and install it just in case it breaks my XP install.

Edit: I installed it, but it hasn't made any difference. I also tried the GS400 Win98 Driver. The problem appears to be the resource conflicts - they are memory address ranges the card needs conflicting with the motherboard's PnP BIOS addresses (or so W98 is saying). The device status in Device Manager is "This device cannot find any free Input/Output Range (I/O) resources to use (Code 12)." I have tried the Hardware Troubleshooter but it has no answers for me. I also tried removing the device that is comflicting (the BIOS PnP extensions) but Win98 just reinstalled on reboot.

What can I do? Maybe I need a motherboard driver? Or cna the card be configured to use a different address range?
 
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Ok.

No drivers installed except the Matrox driver (but it was complaining before I installed the driver).
The motherboard has no on-board graphics card.
There is only one PCI slot (the others are 16 bit ISA).
There is one w98 driver. I will try it.

Cheers
JonB
 
I think I have a G450 CD-ROM which automatically detects the driver in windows 98 (I've used it before for the card under 9x). If you need an .ISO of the CD-ROM let me know. I haven't been able to find an image of the disc anywhere else myself.
 
I did a Matrox AGP comparison project a while ago, comparing all the Matrox cards for 3D Gaming in Windows 98.


I put the Windows 9x drivers on my website: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/drivers-for-matrox.html

For disabling V-sync I found the Matrox utility useless, it wouldn't work at all and used PowerStrip instead: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/powerstrip.html

For Gaming the "best" card is the G400 Max. The later cards are all slower, even the G550 is not much faster, if at all.

Highlight of these cards are excellent image quality, although you can use other cards with DVI. Environment Mapped Bump Mapping is the other highlight. Lots of games supported it through patches.

In this game you get some cool water effects which only work on Matrox cards:

http://youtu.be/F5TcQAIP_Oc

Drivers is what let Matrox down, especially OpenGL although I found that the latest driver actually works quite well and, at least in the games I used in the video, haven't had any issues.

Still, it doesn't do glide and there are better OpenGL and DirectX cards available with much better drivers for games, but still an interesting and useful card.
 
Thanks for the driver code. I tried it and the installer did not recognise the card. However, I do have some earlier versions of this and the card is recognised but I still have the resource conflict. I can't imagine what is causing this - maybe I need more memory on the motherboard?
 
I had another go at this and I cannot see what is wrong.

Is the G450 Dual Head card not compatible with Windows 98? I could not find a w9x driver for it on the Matrox site. The driver on your site will not load, because it doesn't recognise the G450. How annoying.

I'm going to offer some more information in the hope that someone can help me.

The card has memory conflicts with another device called "System board extension for PnP BIOS". There are several memory ranges but they go from 00000000 to 01FFFFFF (in fact that is the first one on the list). I don't get it, that is a huge range. But the card seems to be asking for it for some reason, on Windows "Use automatic settings" in the card Properties (Resources) tab. These cannot be changed.

So I am totally stuck here (in 640x480 16 colours). What is a "System board extension for PnP BIOS", anyway?
 
Go into the BIOS and make sure "PnP OS" is set to "yes" and change "reset configuration data" to "enabled"

If that doesn't work, try running the add hardware wizard and let it search the system.
 
@GioGaBiTe: Thanks, I tried that but it made no difference.

That said, I do have some news.

I'm not quite sure what's going on here, but I booted into safe mode and there was no conflict. I'd reserved the address range in system settings so that the PnP thing would choose different address ranges, then rebooted. The G450 wouldn't work, but in safe mode I could see there is no longer a conflict. So now I have no Windows boot at all - just a blank screen with a flashing cursor at top left. I attempted to reinstall windows but I still have it. I am going to try again, but this time delete the c:\windows directory entirely first, because it's possible the G450 is working but I have the wrong drivers loaded. Safe Mode doesn't allow me to load drivers, how pointless is that?
 
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That would explain it. But right now, I am struggling to get back to where I was (with a bootable system, albeit with memory conflicts and VGA only). Right now i can only run in safe mode.

There are as far as I am aware, no ISA resources, and the BIOS is configured to auto PCI detect. I loaded default settings to reset the thing to a known state.

Edit: Now I am back in VGA only mode but I can't access the CD-ROM drive (so the Matrox driver disk isn't available to me). Every time I try to open it from Windows Explorer I get a fatal error 06 (BSOD), but it is fine in both DOS mode and DOS prompt (from within Windows 98 ). That is really odd..

Edit2: Darn it. It's the setup.exe that is crashing when I open the CD. It works if you right click and "Explore.." it. But I still can't install the drivers. So odd, it all worked before (apart from the memory clash)!

Edit3: Just stumbled across this https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/188481 - it suggests reallocating IRQs for PCI devices. So I moved the IDE interface from AUTO to PCI SLOT 2 which I know is free, and now the Matrox installer runs. But I am still in VGA mode and Windows says the adapter is not set up correctly. Sigh.
 
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I ran into a similar problem years ago. The machines that came with the 450's installed were running Win2k, however we needed to install Win98. We'd get everything set up, and when it came to install the video driver, we get conflicts. We ended up swapping out the cards until we were ready to move up to Win2k. We didn't have the time to go back and figure out which driver worked in 98.

I know this doesn't help your situation, but at least you're aware this isn't an isolated issue.
 
JonB said:
I have a Matrox G450 on my CP/M transfer machine. It's fine in DOS mode but when launching Windows 98 I get a dialogue box complaining there are system resource clashes, and the GUI runs in the basic 600x400 16 colour mode.

I had a look at the Matrox website but they only list drivers for WinXP and later for the G450.
Click to expand...

Did you try the Win98/SE driver pack @ www.matrox.com/graphics/ct/support/drivers/files/w9x_682.php

It specifically states support for the G450...

gwk
 
sorry to bother you with this old one, but one thing seems to be still wrong here...

For the G400 series cards including it's predecessors like G450/550 D3D can be forced to v-sync via matrox-tweak-tool,
but OpenGL can not, regardless what my settings are, OpenGL V-sync seems not to be supported and there is no real switch for that, even in the matrox-tweaking tool. Though the tearing is not as noticeable as on other cards but there are circumstances wich require a real hard vsync setting nad that seems not to be possible.

My latests tests show that behavior 5.72 Win2K driver G450/550:
- OpenGL => hard flickering opengl games when the picture is slowly shown. Can be fully fixed when loading fraps before. strange
- OpenGL => some software swicthes the TFT to 640x480 64hz instead of 60 hz, tearing visible, no real vsync, some software switches to 75hz (I am not sure what API is used, seems that it is openGL, but I am not 100% sure. MSI Afterburner Win2k does not work with Matrox-Drivers.

Doc

opengl g400 vsync [Archive] - MURC

I am trying to vsync a program that I am developing to present stimuli in an experimental psychology lab. Controlling the timing and duration (nb. of frames) of stimuli is of utmost importance for this application. I have WK2000/MilleniumDHG400Max/DELLM990 monitor with last matrox...
www.murc.ws
My guess is that Matrox G400 drivers never supported
the WGL_EXT_swap_control extension but I could not
get answer from Matrox Tech Support.
Click to expand...
 
OpenGL support for these cards was so bad that Matrox removed it from later drivers. I would not even bother with it. It's a nice card due to its picture quality, but I would recommend pairing it with a Voodoo2.
 
IIRC the place i was working at got in some Dell Precision desktops with a Matrox card. The systems were shipped with Windows 2k, however we were still using Windows 98. I recall them having issues with the drivers, and the solution at the time was replace the video card with another brand card. Later on we migrated to Win 2k, and I was able to reinstall the cards.
 
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