Steve_R Posted December 18, 2004 Share Posted December 18, 2004 GOOD NEWS the 3D graphics loaded on the Sony Viao. (Duplicate message from Sony Viao Thread) Since today is Saturday, I had time to go over this issue. I believe the problem was solved, in short, by reloading DIRECTX 9c. The current SIS driver version that I have is 6.14.10.3640. I tried to install the zipped version "sis650_740.zip" but ran into a series of roadblocks. The major one being that the Windows uninstall program would hang. Windows also would not let me overwrite the existing driver. Anyway, as I read the forum messages, one message mentioned DIRECTX. Since nothing else appeared to work, I reloaded DIRECTX 9c off the Microsoft webpage, and CMAK loaded!!!! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 18, 2004 Share Posted December 18, 2004 I'm not sure why the uninstall program hangs or why the driver refuses to be overwritten. If necessary, remove the driver/device manually from the Device Manager and reboot. The one problem with this method is that you need to remove the INF file from \Windows\Inf for the SiS driver (it may be labelled OEMx.inf) before rebooting or you'll just reinstall the original driver again. To my knowledge it isn't DirectX 9.0c that fixes the problem with the SiS-provided drivers. It turns out that the cause of the of the incompatibility with the SiS-provided drivers are the control panels that SiS installs with their drivers (or some combination of registry entries, etc. that enables them). You can actually use the SiS-provided 3.64 drivers (linked to in the posts above), but do not use the setup program which installs the control panels. The drivers alone (without the control panels) will work. After extracting the 3.64 drivers you can install the AGP driver that's located in \Setup\AGPPack\AGP\current\WINXP (the last directory may be whatever Windows version you're running). There's no installer program for the AGP drivers alone, so they will have to be installed manual. In the Device Manager (Control Panels > System control panel > Hardware tab > Device Manager button) go to the System Devices section and open it up. Look for a "SiS CPU to AGP Controller" (or something to that effect). Double-click on that and go to the Driver tab and then click the Update Driver button and go through that process (pointing to the above files) to update the AGP driver. This may require a reboot after the driver is updated. The same can be done for the video drivers using the Device Manager and the method above. The driver will be located in the \Setup\WinXP_2K or Win98_ME directories. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve_R Posted December 19, 2004 Share Posted December 19, 2004 Thanks very much for your help. I believe that you have pointed out an obscure point. Though the drivers did not unload, the SIS control panel did. I played the game last night on the Sony Viao and it worked. I have been hesitant about removing the drivers as I have an LCD monitor and without the drivers the monitor reports "Range Error" and doesn't display anything. The FX-5500 video card arrived. I have not installed it yet. CMAK does work with the SIS-650 chipset, so problem solved. So Thanks again. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
baselope Posted December 23, 2004 Share Posted December 23, 2004 After reviewing the excellent progress made above, I decided to give my SIS741 another try. Here's what I did: 1. Downloaded the driver from the majorgeek.com link listed previously. 2. Uninstalled the current vga driver and rebooted 3. Used the windows installer to install the 3.64 version of the SiS 741 vga driver and rebooted Unfortunately the above procedure did not work... I also tried updating the AGP driver, although I have an onboard SiS 741GX chipset - it didn't help either (as expected). Any comments/tips? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
baselope Posted December 23, 2004 Share Posted December 23, 2004 Also, to clarify above, I didn't use the provided installer, I used the standard windows driver interface to search the directory "manually". The utilities did not load, just the driver this time. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
baselope Posted December 23, 2004 Share Posted December 23, 2004 Further clarification of above: I did NOT delete any .inf files, but the driver version is listed at .364 in the device manager. Frankly I'm nervous deleting .inf files from windows without knowing exactly which ones are the right ones... there's a lot of OEMx.inf files how do I know they are all SiS? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 23, 2004 Share Posted December 23, 2004 To determine which .INF file to delete you have to look at them manually with a text editor (notepad). The SiS ones should mention SiS or its full name 'Silicon Integrated Systems' somewhere near the top of the file. You'll then need to browse through the file to determine if this particular INF file is for video or something else. If you're still not sure, then possibly moving all of the OEMx.INF files to another directory (temporarily) may help. Deleting the .INF is only necessary to prevent the original driver from being reinstalled. I'm not sure why you didn't have success with this driver, since I tested this specifically with an SiS 741GX chipset (though I did install the AGP driver first). How did you 'uninstall' your previous driver and what was your previous driver ? Did you use the Add/Remove Programs control panel or just remove the device from the Device Manager ? If you used a setup program/installer, then you would want to use the Add/Remove Programs control panel. If you don't, then there's the possibility that certain files and registry settings have remained, which may be the core reason for the compatibility problem. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
baselope Posted December 29, 2004 Share Posted December 29, 2004 Maybe I'm not doing this right... I tried again today, and here's what I did: 1. Removed sis driver/utilities from Add/Remove Program screen. 2. Removed SiS OEM1.INF and OEM5.INF and four other SiS*.inf files. I left the INF file for the AGP driver. I previously updated the AGP driver using the 364 sis driver package, without deleting INF files. 3. restarted my computer. The add new hardware dialog popped up and I browsed to the 364 driver XP directory and chose the 741 driver. I then restarted the computer. The OEMx.INF files were still gone when I checked. Unfortunately... it still didn't work. I must be doing something a bit different. I noticed that the driver still showed up on the add/remove programs listings. Does this mean that somehow the utilities got installed anyway? Also, I noticed there were two drivers in the directory - a 741 driver, and then one that seemed to support a whole host of models. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 30, 2004 Share Posted December 30, 2004 Use the .INF file in the Setup\WinXP_2K directory named sisgr.inf. I'm not at the machine to check this, but I don't believe that there should be an entry in the Add/Remove Programs control panel for the driver if you just use the INF file to install the driver alone without the control panels. This is definitely something different from the SiS AGP driver install ? You should definitely notice the SiS tabs in the Display control panel's Advanced settings if the installer program has been used. For the display driver in Windows 2000/XP you only need the following files and everything else (other than the AGP driver install) can be deleted: InstFunc.dll sis650.bin sis660.bin sis740.bin sis741.bin sis760.bin SiSBase.dll sisgl.dll sisgr.cat sisgr.inf sisgrp.sys sisgrv.dll SiSInst.dll SiSParse.dll SiSPInst.dll SiSPower.dll srvkp.sys For the AGP drivers (using the Device Manager - as above for the primary display driver - to install) you need the following files for Windows XP: sisagp.cat sisagp.inf sisagpx.sys You may potentially have to go into the registry to manually remove the SiS settings. However since I don't have that machine setup right now I can't instruct you yet on which settings to remove, as of yet. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
baselope Posted December 31, 2004 Share Posted December 31, 2004 Schrullenhaft, THANKS!!! I finally got it working. I think there were two possible things that I might have done wrong: First, it offers me two drivers when I pick the .inf file from the install directory: just the SiS 741, and another that supports several SiS models. I think before I might have chosen the wrong one before switching to the plain SiS 741 version?? Maybe picking the other version first might have installed some portion of the utilities. Second, maybe the AGP driver was not after all correctly installed. I updated it again this time too. The long and short of it is, this time not only did I not get the SiS tabs in the display panel, which were not there before after the first couple tries, but I also did not get the SiS driver listed in the Add/Remove Programs. Before, even though I no longer had the SiS display properties tabs, I could still see it in Add/Remove Programs. Now it's all fixed, and I owe you a beer. It will be convenient to play on my desktop again sometimes So, anyone reading this, SiS 741 does seem to actually work ok if you get the procedure right to install the AGP and display drivers. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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