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Lopson
 

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« on: 2008-02-22, 14:41 »
My old 386 is finally starting to have hardware problems. For some time now, the graphic card has been dying, a behaviour easily identified by the random switch between black & white and 256 colors. So I ran across the neighbourhood in search of a replacement, and found an old Oak Technology ISA card, model TX2953526. Anyway, I install the card in one of the ISA slots, turn the computer on and, to see how good it is, run Ultimate Doom for a while. However, the screen goes blank right at the startup of the game. And if I use CTRL+ATL+DEL, the computer goes mad, and refuses to startup DOS, among other things.
I've tried a few things: changed the RAM slots used by the RAM modules, changed the ISA slot used by the graphic card and removed the sound card. Nothing changed.

My question is: do you think this is software related? I don't think DOS needs drivers to run a graphic card properly, or does it? I sure as Hell know that Windows (3.1) doesn't need new drivers, since the ones I'm using are the universal VGA drivers to run it, and even if I did change them, it would only affect Windows itself. Or might this be some problem related to the motherboard (unlikely), or the graphic card itself?
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Phoenix
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« Reply #1 on: 2008-02-22, 18:50 »
DOS does not need drivers for standard VGA modes, nor for VESA SVGA modes I think.  As long as the DOS version you're using supports SVGA and your monitor does as well it you should be fine there.  I no longer have my original 486 system but I think for boot purposes to play games like Wolfenstein and Doom I ran a very lean boot file and I don't remember anything beyond the usual stuff - mouse driver, himem.sys, buffers, stacks, etc.

The video mode changing from color to B&W sounds like the card is bad and it's losing the color saturation on the DAC output.  DOS programs typically either work or they do not, so it doesn't sound like software.  If you start seeing freakish behavior like this it's more likely the hardware is going.  It sounds like either the new video card is faulty as well or your system board is flaking out.  Since it only goes nuts and locks the system on the new card, I'd be more suspicious of the new video card being faulty but your motherboard could be on the way out.  It's hard to know without having a known good card to test against, but if the only problem with the system on the first video card is random image desaturation, then I do not think the motherboard is at fault.  You should be having a lot of other problems, like random memory corruption, system freezes, or the hard drive randomly generating errors regardless of what video card is in place, if it's the system board.

My old ISA video card was a Trident TVGA8900c.  I can't remember ever having any problems with it and it served me faithfully until I upgraded my system.  I found one here (can't necessarily vouch for the vendor, never heard of them before so buy at your own risk) and there's some on ebay for $20-$30 or so.  I'd try swapping the video again.
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