bill@polygen.uucp (Bill Poitras) (10/10/90)
Recently I bought a STB EM-16 VGA board. It is also sold as the PowerGraph VGA board. It is based on the Tseng Labs 4000 chipset and uses AMI Bios. It has 1MB on board. It comes with great drivers (640x480x256,800x600x256, 1024x768x256) for windows 3.0. My problem: I have a WD1006/SR2 (RLL) HD/FD controller, and a ST277R (65M) drive. a Chicony 386SX motherboard with Pheonix BIOS. I have disabled bios on my drive controller so the system gets the drive parameters from the CMOS setup. When the system boots the bootup beep is different from the normal bootup beep. Kind of like a system error, but no error message is given. When my system comes up, I can't write to the drive. DOS gives me "Write error writing to drive C...". When I replace my VGA card with my old EGA card, the problem goes away. Is this a problem with my VGA card? Or is this just a incompatibility between the Tseng labs chip set and my controller. Any help would greatly be appreciated. +-----------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------+ | Bill Poitras | Polygen Corporation | {princeton mit-eddie | | (bill) | Waltham, MA USA | bu sunne}!polygen!bill | | | | bill@polygen.com | +-----------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------+
phil@brahms.amd.com (Phil Ngai) (10/12/90)
In article <837@redford.UUCP> bill@redford.UUCP (Bill Poitras(X258)) writes: |Recently I bought a STB EM-16 VGA board. It is also sold as the PowerGraph |VGA board. It is based on the Tseng Labs 4000 chipset and uses AMI Bios. It |has 1MB on board. It comes with great drivers (640x480x256,800x600x256, |1024x768x256) for windows 3.0. My problem: I have a WD1006/SR2 (RLL) HD/FD If you have a WD1006, you have to run your VGA BIOS in 8-bit mode. This doesn't hurt performance if you also have shadow RAM for your BIOS. -- The Bill of Rights isn't perfect, but it's better than what we have now.
cld@kd4nc.UUCP (Charles D'Englere) (10/12/90)
bill@polygen.uucp (Bill Poitras) writes: >Recently I bought a STB EM-16 VGA board. It is also sold as the PowerGraph >VGA board. It is based on the Tseng Labs 4000 chipset and uses AMI Bios. It >has 1MB on board. It comes with great drivers (640x480x256,800x600x256, >1024x768x256) for windows 3.0. My problem: I have a WD1006/SR2 (RLL) HD/FD >controller, and a ST277R (65M) drive. a Chicony 386SX motherboard with Pheonix >BIOS. I have disabled bios on my drive controller so the system gets the >drive parameters from the CMOS setup. When the system boots the bootup beep is >different from the normal bootup beep. Kind of like a system error, but no >error message is given. When my system comes up, I can't write to the drive. >DOS gives me "Write error writing to drive C...". When I replace my VGA card >with my old EGA card, the problem goes away. Is this a problem with my >VGA card? Or is this just a incompatibility between the Tseng labs chip set >and my controller. Any help would greatly be appreciated. >+-----------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------+ >| Bill Poitras | Polygen Corporation | {princeton mit-eddie | >| (bill) | Waltham, MA USA | bu sunne}!polygen!bill | >| | | bill@polygen.com | >+-----------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------+ I have just installed a STB EM-16 VGA myself and have found no problems. I have the board installed in a Micronics 386-25 board with 8MB DRAM, WD1006-SE2, PRIAM V185 hard drive, Archive 60MB tape drive, and Computone Intelliport AT6 serial board. I have this system setup running MSDOS 3.20 and Windows 3.0 without any problems at 800x600x256 (this is a really nice board). I have a customer that has the STB 640 VGA which is only 16 colors in the higher resolution modes. The board did not work in the 20mHz 386 C&T board that he had. The board would not even work with a C&T VGA card. There was a bus addressing problem. You could have a problem with the mother board or you could have a problem with the VGA card. When I am not running MSDOS, I am running Interactive 386/ix UNIX Release 3.2, Version 2.2 with Xwindows at 800x600x256. I could run 1024x768x256 but my monitor can't handle the stress of the higher frequecy that long. Let us know what you find. Charles -- C. D'Englere Consulting UUCP: {...!gatech,!emory}!kd4nc!cld Charles L. D'Englere Phone: 404+3259074 1409 Bronze Leaf Ct. Stone Mountain, GA 30083