Broken BlizzVision?

[Karlos]

Before you panic, try CGX 4.2. CGX3 is buggy and the permedia2 driver for it is especially so. This causes all sorts of odd graphichal glitches.

Failing that, there are hardware issues with the BVision.

1) Is it seated properly? Make sure the mounting screws are reasonably tight (not overly so, you don't want to crack the pcb).

2) Is it getting enough power? I found my 1200T system to be much more reliable after using 2 power inputs (the original connector + the floppy port).

3) Is it getting too hot? The P2 chip on the bvision shipped is without a heatsink or fan. I fitted a power amplifier's high dissipation heatsink on mine and I have a case cooling fan blowing air over the motherboard very close by.

Failing all that, you might have a hardware problem. I had a problem with my old BVision, specifically a problem with the VRAM. The Permedia2 uses 8Mb of SGRAM arranged in a linear sequence of 4 banks of 2Mb. On my old card, the 3rd bank was stuffed. Any graphics data in there was corrupted rapidly.

This causes problems the moment you used a resolution like 1600x1200x16, which is just shy of 4Mb in size. The next thing that tried to allocate VRAM was forced to get it from the dodgy region and was immediately corrupted.

Many of these type of problems I heard about were with DCE versions of the card.

[Karlos]

@Brian

A simple way to see if the VRAM is dodgy (or at least contains corrupted data) is to use cybergrab to grab your screen to an iff file. If you load this image and the lines are part of it (to be totally sure, you could load the image on another computer), then the VRAM containing screen was corrupted originally. As I said, my first BVision came free with an entire 2Mb bank of duff memory :-(

[Karlos]

@Brian

Take a screenshot of the defective screenmode with cybergrab. If the lines show up in the saved image, then the image itself is somehow screwed up in video ram. This is more likely to indicate a hardware fault (such as defective SGRAM).