New G400-TV user hits first problem: Halflife

[jblanken]

I installed HalfLife and when the game starts, it seems like it changes video modes and my monitor isn't syncing or something - I see the screen flicker and intermittently when there is something displayed, its really impossible to do anything, the image is like about a half dozen double-exposures, but it looks like its trying to show the first screen of the game with menu choices. I can't tell what video mode its in and I don't know whats wrong, but maybe if I knew what mode its in, I could check the settings in the display control panel.

I have a Celeron 466 overclocked just a little, Windows 98 (first release), a Marvel G400-TV, and Half Life, all using the stock versions/drivers which came on the original CDs. This machine isn't online so updating the versions is not as easy as I'd like, but I expected the game to at least get up on its knees and shamble around without major tweaking. :^( I can task-switch away from the game and/or kill it from the task manager, and my system is still sane as far as I can tell.

What should I do? I just built the machine from scratch and I haven't tried installing any other games yet, after all, why save the best for last? I'll see if anything else succeeds (have Quake II to try next), but so far I've installed the SB Live! Platinum, the keyboard and mouse, and had zero problems with the bundled hardware utilities and demos. I could try the games bundled with the video and sound cards also, which one(s) might be informative?

Thanks,

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Jeffrey Blankenship

[jblanken]

Followup:

Over lunch I got past this, here's how:
On a hunch I ran dxdiag (?) and ran the video tests. Full screen hardware acceleration failed and looked ALOT like what I had in Half-life. Following the troubleshooter's instructions, I disabled hardware acceleration via the Half-life CD's direct x installer. Voila! Half life works.
I spent WAY too much time playing... Then I re-ran dxdiag and found hardware acceleration passed, so I re-enabled it. We'll see if that was a bad idea or not later...

By the way, I saw some rendering problems while in Half-life, it looked like z-buffer jitter. I will be looking around in here to see if it matches up with a problem/solution.
Too bad getting a PC set up is still a lot like an adventure game - find the keys, move on to the next challenge. :^)

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Jeffrey Blankenship

[Kruzin]

So you are running the game in D3D mode?
Try OpenGL mode. That's the game's native API.
Also, even though it may not be the most convenient thing, I definatly suggest updating your drivers, and getting TurboGL on there. MANY things have been fixed/improved since the CD version of the drivers.

And if you have to disable hardware acceleration to make any game run, there is something else wrong with the way the card is set up. I'd look into IRQ assignments first...

[jblanken]

Kruzin:
Thank you for the ideas.

You wrote:
>So you are running the game in D3D mode?
Try OpenGL mode. That's the game's native API.<

Here's some clarification - once the game launched successfully, I selected OpenGL in the game's configuration screen, so I would have to switch back to see what the current state of DirectX is (outside of the diagnostic).

>Also, even though it may not be the most convenient thing, I definatly suggest updating your drivers, and getting TurboGL on there. MANY things have been fixed/improved since the CD version of the drivers.<

As for upgrading to the latest drivers, I've been reading this forum and it looks like there were a few updates, especially last Fall, that didn't go over so well. Is the newest stuff considered stable, and are the horror stories pretty much the exceptional cases? I'd like to see the z-buffer rendering bug go away, and see whatever other improvements there are, but I'm trying to assess the risk and choose the best version to install before I move on it. Please let me know.

> And if you have to disable hardware acceleration to make any game run, there is something else wrong with the way the card is set up. I'd look into IRQ assignments first...<

Hmmm... On my old PC, manually setting IRQ/DMA was a major concern, but this system is 100% PnP, and I have only two cards on the bus so far, video and sound. So I just let the BIOS and Win98 handle everything. I would expect to see those yellow or red icons in Device Manager if there's a conflict, right? I haven't seen any so far, but sound just went in last night, so I will go back and have a closer look. Is there a better way to verify that there is no conflict?

And at the risk of getting brown on my nose, I thank you for taking an interest. Its this murc site that gave me confidence that I could overcome any problems that crop up as I make my way through getting all the functionality out of this card. Soon to come I'll be hooking up a DVD-ROM drive, cable TV and a VCR to start using the TV functions, which I hope live up to my expectations of being the best on the market.

Ciao,

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Jeffrey Blankenship

[Johnny Ray]

Jeffrey,

Continuing along Kruzin's line of thought, current PCI implementation allows IRQ sharing on the PCI bus. So hardware CAN share IRQs and not appear as a problem in Window's System. Everyone here will tell you that in general, any video card will not be happy sharing an IRQ, and it should be above IRQ 9. How about posting your IRQs?

John

[Johnny Ray]

Jeffrey,

Continuing along Kruzin's line of thought, current PCI implementation allows IRQ sharing on the PCI bus. So hardware CAN share IRQs and not appear as a problem in Window's System. Everyone here will tell you that in general, any video card will not be happy sharing an IRQ, and it should be above IRQ 9. How about posting your IRQs?

John

[jblanken]

I had to run the gauntlet, but it appears I've made it to the bonus round.

What didn't work: format, re-install Win98, install 98SE upgrade, install Matrox drivers from CD. All I got was a flickering screen.
Time for the twelve-step program.

I started from scratch, and I did so many things its impossible to say where exactly things were fixed, but I'd suspect I smacked several bugs along the way. Following advice found in these forums, I did the following:

0. I pulled the only other card besides the Matrox from the bus, an SB Live!, so the
Matrox would have first crack at the PNP BIOS.

1. I downloaded the latest BIOS from Microstar's web site and installed it on the motherboard. (Amazingly, fresh from the box, version 3.1 BIOS was installed, the current version is 3.4, three releases might make a difference...)

2. I formatted the hard disk.

3. I set the AGP aperture in the BIOS to 256 MB.

4. I ran the Matrox reset BIOS utility for the video card.

Some editorial comments are in order here. This is a brain-dead little bugger that doesn't know when to quit, and the documentation is vague on the subject as well, so I killed it after a few cycles of what appears to be an infinite loop of the sort you learn to debug in your first CS class. Also, its impossible to know whether the BIOS before and after were different, since there is practically no feedback. Definitely a bit of polishing remains to be done to this utility. :^) Moving along,

5. I installed the OS (Windows 98).
6. I checked IRQs. The card is happily at 11, with no conflicts.
7. I installed the latest Matrox drivers from the web site. Success! My advice is don't touch the CD which came with the Matrox until after the current drivers and video tools are installed, or you may get no further than this. And you'll need a box of floppies.
8. I installed the monitor .inf file and after a bit of two-stepping, got Power Desk to acknowledge this had been done.
Windows indicated I had changed to my actual monitor, but Power Desk didn't, until I went back in the Control Panel->Display and clicked on Advanced->Monitor->Change again, selecting the same monitor a second time. This time Windows did something "extra" that Power Desk liked. :^) Now I can set refresh rates, etc. through Power Desk.
9. I installed the latest video tools from the Matrox web site. I can't test these as I have no cable or VCR hooked up yet, but very soon now I will.
10. I installed the SB Live! Platinum sound card and drivers.
11. I installed the Matrox DVD player from the CD.
12. I tried to get AC-3 out from the spdif on the Live! Drive. All I got was stereo PCM. The Matrox web site and the DVD player help files say this is possible, but the truth is out there. The required controls are not there in the DVD player control panel, though the screen shot in Help shows it. The real answer is found on this forum, and it is to get DVD Genie and enable AC-3 to SPDIF, and choose the supported sound card. Voila! All is right with the world.
I'll be looking for the upcoming upgrade to the Matrox player, which is supposed to handle this without help from a third-party app.

Summary:
I must say, I was on the verge of giving up hope, but after doing all this, the quality of the Matrox card and the Ravisent player shines through like everyone said it would. But I pity anyone who runs into this when upgrading a mature system with lots of apps and data on it.

Next I'll try the latest TurboGL driver (Quake II and Half-Life will be the acid tests), and the PC-VCR/Avid studio software. I'll be trying to edit some video and see how bad that 2-Gig Windows video file glitch and the copy-protect-false-trigger are, and find out what can be done about it. What adventures await? Like I said, I'm on to the bonus round, I will most likely be found surfing the desktop video forum!