Broken BlizzVision?

[Brian]

Installed CGFX3 for my BVision today and found that I get about 15-20 vertical lines down the screen (depending on what mode I chuse). Anyone know what can cause this? Broken BV? Bad connection to the BPPC? Interferance? Bad power? Can this be CGFX3's doing? :-(

I'm desperat here... I need this to work so anyone that's encountered this or think they know what can be the cause of this please fill me in.

[bloodline]

Brian wrote:
Installed CGFX3 for my BVision today and found that I get about 15-20 vertical lines down the screen (depending on what mode I chuse). Anyone know what can cause this? Broken BV? Bad connection to the BPPC? Interferance? Bad power? Can this be CGFX3's doing? :-(

I'm desperat here... I need this to work so anyone that's encountered this or think they know what can be the cause of this please fill me in.

Hmmm, I remember several people having this problem with BVisions... I seem to remember it was something to do with over heating...

[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.

[Brian]

I don't have anything better than CGFX3 else I would have tossed that pos out the window a long time ago... had weird gfx problems with my CV3D card also with CGFX3 but lucky for me P96 supported that board at least.

1. I do remember that I had to loosen a screw cause I thought the board looked a little out of shape... perhaps it wasn't enough or I needed to tighten both screws exactly the same? I also know that in my tower the BV get very close to the face plats... so close in fact that it might get a little bent on one of the cards that holds my flickerfixer output. It could cause bad connection I guess?

2. Power should be no problem... The tower have a bussboard and the BPPC is connected to this board and as the bussboard also have a power input I would like to think that would be enough.

3. I don't think it's a heat problem as the lines (these are inverted color vertical 1 pixel whide lines) comes emediatly after a reset and the P2 chip have a heatsing on it.

Tried 800*600 (won't go any higher for unknown reasons) in 8-24bit and all modes produced these lines though if I remember correctly it was sligtly fewer lines on lesser color modes.

[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 :-(

[Brian]

Well.. I installed CGFX4.3 and the problem dissapeared from 24bit modes but the rest still have those "vertical noice lines". So I guess we can rule out software which leaves just the hardware left... I don't like it but the facts say the card is somewhat defective. :-(

[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).