Lost my low res screenmodes - Mediator - Voodoo3 :(

[Angus]

I've got a towered 1200 (060) with a Mediator and Voodoo3.
 
I've not touched the screenmodes on my Voodoo3 with Picasso96mode for ages. I use 800x600 for Workbench and my IBrowse and DOpus screens etc.

But I tried running a couple of games, Blitz Quake and Duke Nukem 3D last night and the lower res screens 300x 200 (or 240) that I used are no longer working.

When I try to run the games the monitor attempts to display the new screenmode but it just goes black, and generally I can't do anything and have to reboot.

I think maybe I attempted some tweaking to the screenmodes a year or so back, and the low res screens didn't like it.

I've investigated Picasso96mode, changing some of the settings and then trying to see the screen using the Test button (without success) but I'm not really sure what I'm doing.


I'm using a Belinea monitor I got from Eyetech, (perhaps's that has stopped working properly) can anyone tell me how to configure a reliable low res screen, or tell me what may have gone wrong?


Thanks.

[zipper]

I've investigated Picasso96mode, changing some of the settings and then trying to see the screen using the Test button (without success) but I'm not really sure what I'm doing.

When changing the settings the first thing is to check if the resulting refresh is suitable to your monitor - 60 is usually working; a little lower and higher also may be accepted. For instance my monitor accepts about 59 - 62 and then at least 70 and 75.

[Angus]

zipper wrote:
When changing the settings the first thing is to check if the resulting refresh is suitable to your monitor - 60 is usually working; a little lower and higher also may be accepted. For instance my monitor accepts about 59 - 62 and then at least 70 and 75.

I did a bit more investigating last night, and it seems that the problem only exists with low res (320x200 or 320x240) screens when displaying in 8-bit.

Truecolor etc appears to be fine.    :-/

[zipper]

320x200 8bit in normal mode produces about 15 kHz screen - does your monitor support it? If not, change to doublescan mode, which raises the range to about 31 kHz.

[Angus]

Thanks Zipper, I will give that a try tonight.

[Angus]

It turns out that the 8-bit mode which was set 16.8mhz and double scan (like the others) needed to be dropped to 15.something - at that point I got a display. The other modes in this reso;ution were fine as they were.

Thanks.

[zipper]

Good - in PC world the monitors usually don't support everything you throw into them; it was so nice with Microvitec monitor on Amiga as it usually accepted about everything inside the specs so you very seldom had to meet a black screen.