#Vibrant Drivers
10 messages in this thread
Alan has a good point about excluding memory. I had to eat up most of my upper
memory because I had to exlude A000-C7FF (I'm using emm386 so the line is
x=a000-c7ff). But this solved the last of my problems. The date of the files
that I am using is 2/28/94. The 4/7/94 version did not work for me either.
Stick with the 2/28 version untils Vibrant says otherwise.
If you are using Rio then you are probably bald like I am from tearing my hair
out. We just switched systems and got away from the old GPIB micro-channel
card in our old system. We switch our scanner's interface card to SCSI and
low-and-behold Rio does not support SCSI. I spent $30,000 on new hardware and
software for this graphics station and AT&T does not support the most widely
used interface standard in the world. Frustrating! Our work-around is to scan
all of our images in Adobe PhotoShop for Windows and save them as a TGA and
them call them up as a background in Rio.
BTW, Vipers are available in either PCI or VLB form though I know nothing about
the VLB version. Also, what version of Rio are you using? We just upgrades to
6.3 to get the VESA support for the Viper PCI card (it seems to be working
fine.)
Let me know how things work out.
Kenny
Actually, I _believe_ (can't remember for sure…) PCI peripherals do not need
to map rom, and therefore do not need exclusions from base memory.
John Tissavary (LUNA cie)
Now wouldn't this be special…..<g> I had a feeling this may be the case, as
the Viper PCI docs mention nothing about MM exclusions…
-Alan
When I talked to Diamond they said that I must exclude the A000-C7FF range
(A000-B999 is video memory and C000-C7FF is the ROM address.) I had some other
people tell me to try only excluding C000-C7FF but I had all kinds of problems
whenever I had any other exclusion statement other than A000-C7FF. If you guys
find a trick, please let me know because I am starving for conventional RAM.
I think you are probably talking about the VLB version of the Viper, aren't you
Kenny? JohnT and I were talking about the PCI bus in general, and I had noticed
no mention of MM exclusions in the PCI Viper docs, like in the VLB version (I
have both). I haven't scoured it, though, so please correct me if I am wrong.
-Alan
You are right about the exclusions not being mentioned in the documentation. I
was told by Diamond that I had to have it even on the PCI version. Also,
Vibrant told me I had to exclude C000-C7FF, but if I had problems (which I did)
go ahead and exclude the A000-C7FF area. If you get it to work without these
exclusions, I would be interested to see what you did because I have not had
any success without the full exclusion.
Kenny
Hmmm…I am not using a memory manager to "drum up" a bunch of base memory for
my 3DS configuration, Kenny, so the system runs fine with no exclusions so far.
However, I can tell you that my QEMM configuration still has the exclusions in
it and everything runs fine — I haven't tried it without them yet. A good
indicator for needing the exclusions is when VPRMODE.exe refuses to save it's
.ini file, I have found.
-Alan
Thanks for the advice! I will try the VPRMODE trick. Also, I wonder if I
should go to QEMM instead of EMM386?
viper PCI and Qemm 7.03 X=b000-b100 and of it works fine one my system I think
you can change the Rom address on the Viper card buy I not sure.
Kenny-
If you saw my latest message you know I'm running now with the driver available
on this forum. A later driver from Vibrant BBS dated 4/8/94 did NOT work for
me.
Re: RIO: this has to be the all-time irritating product as far as I'm
concerned. My favorite RIO story was when (v 3.0?) we discovered that our
postscript files had no w's or m's in them, even though the screen and .tga
file outputs were fine. The solution? Buy the next release! ($200? $300 more?)
The bug was fixed in the next release. (This was about the time they started
charging for technical support, so if I recall correctly our call reporting the
bug counted as our "free" call. The next one was going to cost us!) I didn't
have a choice but to upgrade, but it isn't like I was happy with it.
We still use it, but I think we stopped at version 5.x.
–Noah