Newbie here cannot get games to see V2 in Win98.

[Commie]

Hello, I'm new to this sort of thing but it's not like installing a Voodoo2 should be all that difficult. For some reason I cannot get any game to see the Voodoo card even though it shows up in the Device Manager. When clicking on the driver tab though in manager it says that 'no device driver needed or detected'. Is that the problem?

I used just about every combination of reference and third party drivers, manually moved the glide.dll files to windows registry, tried the card in an XP machine then did a fresh install of Win 98 on a P4 2ghz, 512 RAM, Geforce 4 Ti4200 (my current box I'm trying to get it to work)and nothing seems to work!

Every game complains that 3dfx card not detected despite seemingly no problems in device manager apart from the strange lack of driver, but I don't know what to do(if anything is even needed) about that. I tried updating driver, but it just goes through the motions of 'reinstalling' and nothing changes.

Could there be something wrong with the card? It seems in top class condition. One other thing, in Win98 it freezes whenever I try to click on the voodoo2 tab in properties and I keep getting a rundll32 error quite regularly after 'installing' the voodoo2 which I never got when just the Geforce was there.

[pierrickuk]

Hi,

When you tried the card in XP, did it work? Did the card install ok?
Was it on the same computer?

Do you have an old 2d pci card (matrox mystique/millenium, or something contemporary with voodoo2) to try it with? It could be your Geforce gets in the way. I remember that sometimes some AGP settings need to be changed for voodoo2 to work properly.
As I said in another post, you can try supreme snowboarding or dethkarz, I've never had a problem with those games to detect the glide driver.
Also you might want to try with less memory to install win98se properly as some system values need to be changed to handle 512 meg properly.
So:
1) try the card in another machine and see if it works
2) update the motherboard bios and use bios default values
3) clean install win98se on your machine, if possible with an old pci vga card and 256 memory. Install latest drivers for motherboard, sound, usb, vga, etc etc.
4) potential time saver here: clone/backup your installation if everything works properly.
5) install voodoo2 in some non shared pci slot (cf motherboard manual).
6) try v2 latest official driver.
7) try some glide game.
if you're happy with everything, resist the urge to use 512 meg ram.
9) if urge is too strong, install win98se unofficial service pack BEFORE upping the memory.

Hope this helps

[Commie]

Thanks for the help. The card did show up in the device manager and even got the driver to supposedly show up. I used the last reference driver.

Trying games I would either get a "mapmem driver initialization failure" whenever I tried other drivers, but with the last reference driver games would start loading then freeze. Sometimes I would reach the menu and be able to select 'glide' or 'software' so it seems that some games DO see the card but again when actually starting a game it would freeze and/or get a black screen while loading the graphics.

I had heard from somewhere else about potential AGP conflics and thought that my card was too 'new' in comparison and it seems like the problem is due to something stopping the driver from working. I'll look into getting a PCI card but will try your other suggestions first.

I did not know about the Win98 memory problem. I also will try and find less memory as I have just a 512mb stick at the moment so for now I will try that fix for Win98.

Thankyou again for the help and ideas. I'll see what I can do with it!

[pierrickuk]

You're welcome.
Let us know how it goes.
FYI, I'm 99% sure I found the info about AGP in this forum somewhere (that's my main source for voodoo info).
Windows 98 unofficial service pack:
http://exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html
Can't you pick up an old computer for free at some recycling centre (dump)? If not, old parts are easily found on ebay for cheap, or ask your local pc repair shop. If you know someone who can read Chinese and has the relevant card, you'll find everything you want for very cheap on www.taobao.com.
Should you decide to pay for an old PCI video card, try to get one with enough memory (4 megs or more) unless you have an old and small CRT monitor or unless you don't mind low resolutions on your LCD screen.

[H-street]

A Couple of things..

What is the entire system specs?

When you install the reference drivers what does the 3dfx control panel say?

when you open up the control panel you should be see a panel that will show the status of the card and a spinning 3dfx logo.