ATI Rage Pro drivers
Peter Stokes
and if you can believe it am pretty excited about how much stuff I can
refresh since the last time (~2003... where have you gone warpupdates.de?).
I am running Warp 4 FP15. I nicked a new monitor this time 'round and
am determined to get at least 1280x1024X16M resolution from the ATI Rage
Pro 8MB card. I have two free driver choices, each with issues that I
hope will look familiar to someone, please tell me what's fixable!
SDD 7.0.9 (internally 7.0.7, the IBM RagePro/se distro) (SDDGRADD)
- In Firefox, (scaled?) bitmaps often appear flipped upside down. This
is a dealbreaker.
- Ridiculous giant Duplo system fonts, also a dealbreaker, but I see
there are settings/patches for PM and Win-OS/2
- I think stretched TrueType fonts. My memory is hazy because as soon
as I saw the flipped bitmaps I moved on. See below for more reliable
description of same problem with current driver.
- gactrl reveals an interlaced 1600x1200 mode that looked quite steady,
but the actual driver does not seem to support interlaced modes. I got
the same tease with my old monitor trying to get 1024x768 interlaced.
- I worked around this, but is it just me, or does the GAMON utility
query/modify a monitor database that the driver doesn't actually use,
and the GUI show you a different monitor database that you can't modify?
ATI Mach64/Rage Pro native driver (M6432.DLL) Driver reports v2.2 but
package is labeled 5.35, with README dated May 20 1999
- no flipped bitmaps. yay.
- Still ridiculous giant Duplo system fonts. I sorta fixed this (just
for PM) with the fixdisp driver patcher (smallf13.zip package).
- My TrueType fonts compose properly (not irregularly spaced, or badly
kerned) but are all stretched horizontally. The problem occurs only at
1280x1024 with the unpatched M6432.DLL, and at 1024x768 and 1280x1024
with the patched one.
- still no 1600x1200 mode.
Some more info:
I installed SDD first, then dumped it with SETVGA (didn't uninstall),
then installed the ATI driver per instructions. ATI asked and I did NOT
allow it to replace the various *E.FON files with its older versions...
and haven't had any unexpected trouble with bitmap fonts anyway.
Nothing else came up during ATI install.
I am using FreeType/2 v1.2.2 in place of TRUETYPE.DLL, and Innotek's
Font Engine 2.40 on top of that for Firefox/Thunderbird. But I did also
try vanilla TRUETYPE.DLL and I still get the stretch (plus crumulent
rendering of course).
Bottom line:
SDD is a nonstarter unless the flipped graphics can be fixed, but seems
to give me a better chance of addressing all the other problems. Paying
for latest rev of SNAP isn't out of the question, but not speculatively.
It is not obvious to me that it is still for sale.
I haven't tried all the permutations, I know... hoping some good advice
can save me some of the trouble!
Thanks, Peter.
Dave Yeo
Have you tried the personal SNAP driver available at my.scitechsoft.com?
Dave
Percival P. Cassidy
Are you sure that's still available? I tried to create a driver a few
weeks back, and it said it had done so, but I couldn't find anything to
download. IAC, isn't such a driver good only for 6 months?
You do know that Scitech put its video driver stuff up for sale, don't
you? There doesn't seem to be any further development going on.
Perce
Peter Brown
I did read recently that someone tried to get a licence for the last
SNAP build but could not purchase anywhere. Apparently they emailed
Scitech about it and got a free licence. May be worth downloading SNAP
and sending an email...
Regards
Pete
Dave Yeo
> On 03/11/08 03:40 am Dave Yeo wrote:
>
>>
>> Have you tried the personal SNAP driver available at my.scitechsoft.com?
>
>
> Are you sure that's still available? I tried to create a driver a few
> weeks back, and it said it had done so, but I couldn't find anything to
> download. IAC, isn't such a driver good only for 6 months?
>
> You do know that Scitech put its video driver stuff up for sale, don't
> you? There doesn't seem to be any further development going on.
>
> Perce
I created a driver a few weeks back (perhaps a bit more) and DLed it.
For an old ATI Rage pro it shouldn't matter about development not
continueing, the driver should still be better then SDD 7.0.9 and the 6
month thing is still better then nothing.
Dave
ghja...@nospam.net
Doesn't that depends on what it does to your machine when it times out!
-- The drivers I tried, didn't just stop after 6 months, it crashed the
system and made me jump through hoops to get it back up.
>Dave
William L. Hartzell
Peter Stokes wrote:
> After a lengthy period of decay I am reinstalling my system from scratch
> and if you can believe it am pretty excited about how much stuff I can
> refresh since the last time (~2003... where have you gone warpupdates.de?).
I see that he is gone. That site was there when I last look in mid
January... Sorry to see it go. Maybe it is on 'the archive of the
Internet' project site.
<Snip>
--
Bill
Thanks a Million!