Rage Fury Pro problems

[Guest Thumper]

Hello all and I hope someone can help me with this problem.. I have a PackBell PII 350 with 64megs ram. I recently asked the question on this board as to what would be a good upgrade and the concensus was a new 3d card (mine's a Voodoo 2 passthrough card). I went a bought myself a 32meg ATI Rage Fury Pro AGP card and installed it (all by myself and it worked too... )However, I tried CM and nothing but the splash screen(flags..) when the map is supposed to load, game was running just no picture! DirectX up to date, card drivers brand new, any ideas? Thanks in advance..

Thumper

[Schrullenhaft]

Excuse the length of this post (it's my latest novella ). It's a cut & paste of previous suggestions I've made. These instructions are a bit generic and may be used by almost all users, with a few changes, under Win 9x:

Since you had a previous video card or more specifically a previous 3D card you may want to clear any of the VooDoo 2 drivers that may still possibly be present on your system.

To clear previous video drivers from your system you will need to:

First check to see if there is an uninstaller for your current driver. Run that first. When it is finished and it has you reboot (or reboots for you) remember to press the F8 key to get the command prompt-based Startup Menu. Then:

1) Boot in SAFE mode (#3).

2) Go to Control panels - System control panel - device manager tab - click on the plus next to Display Adapters.

3) Delete/Remove ALL video drivers listed here. You may notice that there are several drivers listed here, depending on how many different video cards your computer may have had and how many times you may have installed drivers.

4) Once you have deleted the video drivers listed close up the control panels and go to the Start Menu.

5) Go to Run on the Start Menu and type in "regedit" (without the quotes).

6) This brings up the Registry editor. Any changes made here take effect IMMEDIATELY. There is no save function so any mistakes that are made are permanent (to a degree - backups of the registry can be created and restored, but not from within regedit).

7) Go to the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" key (click on the plus sign like the Device Manager) - ENUM - PCI.

8) Once in the PCI key you will want to click on the "VEN...." keys one at a time and then select the "item" below the initial key. Read through the lines in the right frame of the Registry editor. You will find text in there that describes this key. We are looking for keys that have "Display" in them. Looking

further down you will see the name of the display adapter as it would appear in the Device Manager. You may also want to look for your VooDoo 2 adapter (by whatever name it may be using) and delete it too.

9) Since we deleted all of the display adapters in the Device Manager we may find nothing here. If we do, then we will want to delete it. Highlight (in the left frame) the "Ven..." key and then click delete (on

your keyboard should be fine). Make sure your mouse doesn't wander and you end up deleting the wrong key.

10) Load up Explorer (file manager) and go to Windows/inf/other. In here we are going to look for .inf files that are descriptors for ATI video cards in particular and any other VIDEO cards in general. You may be able to tell what device the .inf is for by its name; other times you will have to open the file up in Notepad and read through it in order to determine what it is for.

11) Once you have deleted the .infs (if you found any) you can reboot your computer. During startup the computer should discover your display adapter. Hopefully it will just use the "Standard SVGA" driver" and not detect it as an "ATI compatible" or something else.

12) Some video cards have "flashable" BIOSs. Most of the time these BIOS upgrades address certain DDC (monitor detect), power saving or minor chipset related issues. On occasion some of these upgrades are necessary for "full" compatibility with the latest drivers (but this is VERY rare however). Be very careful in applying these updates as you can "kill" your board by flashing it incorrectly. Make sure the BIOS you upload to it is for that model (there can be differences in the BIOS versions depending on the amount of RAM on your board, etc.).

13) With the "Standard SVGA" as your display driver install/reinstall DirectX 7.0a. It may or may not detect your video card (usually doesn't if you have it set to a Standard SVGA).

14) Notes on Directx 7.0a:

If you are running a version of DirectX older than 7.0, then you will probably need to upgrade to 7.0a (the "a" revision I think fixes some controller input problems primarily i.e. - joysticks, etc.). One word of warning however - some older games may NOT be fully compatible with DirectX 7.0. Their graphics may get messed up, completely hang or not even start up. Another caveat, unfortunately DirectX 7.0a is SLOWER than 6.1 (I think Charles mentioned this before on the board). You may notice a speed decrease in your system with it loaded up. However some of the feature sets of the latest drivers may have been written with a specific version of DirectX in mind, so it may be a necessary evil (they may mention that a certain version of DirectX is "required").

If your video card has 4Mb or less of memory, then there is a good chance that the drivers that come with DirectX 7.0a will possibly be the latest that are available (DirectX detects the chipset of your video card, so a Diamond video card may be detected as an S3 Virge, etc.). These "generic" drivers MAY solve some problems since they are, uh... tested... by Microsoft (or at least "approved" in some way). The point here is that DirectX may have the "compatible" driver for your card, rather than the actual manufacturer. This will be true for cards that are several years old (in general). These generic drivers however don't have all the frills that some of the manufacturer's modified drivers will have (Diamond for example), so you may be giving some things up (occasionally that may mean a little speed improvement being given up also). HOWEVER, some people have reported problems with CM and the generic drivers/DLLs that come with DirectX. Check with your card's manufacturer or the OEM chipset manufacturer's website for newer drivers. If there are any that mention DirectX 7.0 compatible then DEFINITELY get those, however most older video cards will probably not mention much in the way of DirectX and if they do they may refer to older versions. It may be worth the time to download them anyway in case they offer a fix that the generic drivers from Microsoft don't address.

For those with 8Mb or larger amounts of video memory, then either the "reference drivers" from the OEM chipset manufacturer (i.e. - NVidia, S3, etc.) or the manufacturer's drivers are what you'll need to upgrade to (DirectX typically doesn't have the direct drivers for higher end 3D cards).

Sometimes you'll be given the choice between "Beta" and "WHQL certified" (or just "Certified") drivers. It's a toss up between the two. Beta drivers sometimes fix problems, speed up the card or give you additional features, but they can also be very buggy. WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Lab - if you really wanted to know) certified drivers have supposedly been submitted to Microsoft for approval and have passed some sort of testing. These drivers may not have all the fixes (and are often several revisions behind the latest drivers), but are supposed to work (with Windows at least - not your game !). Better manufacturers will sometimes document the reasons/fixes in their drivers. You obviously won't see CM being listed, but you

may find similar issues with other games that may apply to CM.

Some sites/manufacturers are good enough to post past revisions of drivers. On occasion you will find that the latest video drivers will be buggy and you will need to go back to an earlier version. If your manufacturer doesn't post the older drivers then you need to hold onto your older drivers (be they either on a CD, diskette or zip file).

15) Once you have DirectX loaded up (and you've rebooted), now is the time to load up you specific drivers.

A note for ATI video card owners: When you update your drivers you may get a GPF during the installation. A common cause for this is that your video memory is being cached. You will need to disable this in your CMOS and then attempt the installation again (you can re-enable this feature after the installation).

If you have a non-Intel based chipset and a Rage 128 / 128 Pro, then you may want to get the older, rather than the latest drivers (some VIA chipsets may be fine however), which are available at the ATI website (just somewhat hidden):

The first set here worked for Maus when he was having problems with the latest ATI drivers and his board.

v. 4.11.6216 (which worked for Maus): http://support.atitech.ca/drivers/win98_4116216.html

v. 4.11.6263 (newer, but not newest): http://support.atitech.ca/drivers/win98_4116263.html

I have two different ATI Rage 128s (and a 128 Pro that uses the same family driver) and both work fine with the latest 4.12.6269 driver (transparencies, switching apps, etc - no problems have been duplicated).

There are also settings in your CMOS that you can modify that may affect the behavior of your video card. These settings (and their names) will vary BIOS to BIOS and some may not be available at all (or applicable depending on what bus type your video card is). You can experiment with "VGA Frame Buffer USWC" (caching) and/or Video Memory caching (whatever your BIOS may have). You can also upgrade your motherboard BIOS (if you can identify it). BIOS upgrades for your motherboard may "patch" CPU microcode (primarily for Intel PIIs & IIIs) or possibly "fix" AGP problems and other issues (like hard drive sizes). However, be VERY careful with updating your BIOS if you haven't done it before - it can ruin your whole month if it goes bad.

Another note for those who are running into lockups in CM. You may want to turn off your "audio acceleration". This can be done in DirectX's DXDIAG utility (/Program Files/Directx/Setup/DXDIAG.EXE), on the Audio tab there should be an acceleration slider in the middle of the tab. It's one more thing to possibly try (though most problems are probably due to video issues).