Rage 3D driver for DOS or Win 3.1 needed

S

steves6161

New member
Hi,

I've lucked :) into an old Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop from work. It had Linux installed on it, but I've formatted the HD and installed Windows 3.1. In the process, I've lost all the drivers. The big piece that I'm still missing is a video driver.

The video card is a 3D Rage Mobility-P. The ATI web site doesn't offer support of DOS or Win 3.1 so I'm kind of stuck. Can any of you point me to a DOS or Win 3.2 driver for a 3D Rage Mobility-P video card?

Thanks,
Steve
 
steves6161 said:
Hi,

I've lucked :) into an old Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop from work. It had Linux installed on it, but I've formatted the HD and installed Windows 3.1. In the process, I've lost all the drivers. The big piece that I'm still missing is a video driver.

The video card is a 3D Rage Mobility-P. The ATI web site doesn't offer support of DOS or Win 3.1 so I'm kind of stuck. Can any of you point me to a DOS or Win 3.2 driver for a 3D Rage Mobility-P video card?

Thanks,
Steve
Click to expand...

Install the maximum (512mb) amt of ram. Install Windows 2000 or XP.
 
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Thanks...

Thanks...

Thanks, F1y, that would be an awsome solution if I wanted to install XP on this machine.

I have Vista, XP, and Linux installed on other machines. I want to run Win 3.1 on this laptop, so, as I said, I'm looking for DOS or Win 3.1 compatable drivers for the Rage 3D Mobility card in the laptop. If anybody can help with drivers for the OS I have installed (Win 3.1), I sure like to hear from him or her.

Thanks,
Steve
 
steves6161 said:
Thanks, F1y, that would be an awsome solution if I wanted to install XP on this machine.

I have Vista, XP, and Linux installed on other machines. I want to run Win 3.1 on this laptop, so, as I said, I'm looking for DOS or Win 3.1 compatable drivers for the Rage 3D Mobility card in the laptop. If anybody can help with drivers for the OS I have installed (Win 3.1), I sure like to hear from him or her.

Thanks,
Steve
Click to expand...

I don't think you're going to find a driver if Win 3.11 isn't detecting it as an SVGA device out of the box. AGP didn't even exist in Win3.11 days. I mean Trident was making ISA video cards up and until 1994. PCI wasn't even created until mid-1993 and AGP wasn't created until 1997.

AGP support would probably require chipset drivers as well. I just don't think you're going to find what you're looking for. If you want to use DOS games/utilities, ATI always has had good VESA support so you shouldn't need any TSR to get proper VESA 2.0 resolutions/color depth.

That 7500 came out in 1999 and the Dell website lists no video driver for the 7500, so it's quite possible one was never made for Win 3.11.
 
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Why do you want to install Win 3.1? I can't really think of a reason not to use a Virtual Machine to do whatever it is you need to do.
 
caveman-jim said:
Why do you want to install Win 3.1? I can't really think of a reason not to use a Virtual Machine to do whatever it is you need to do.
Click to expand...

That's what I was thinking. Either VMware Player or DOSBox or something along those lines unless there is some Win 3.11 Legacy app that he needs.
 
Pr3tty F1y said:
That's what I was thinking. Either VMware Player or DOSBox or something along those lines unless there is some Win 3.11 Legacy app that he needs.
Click to expand...

Actually the reason to not use a VM would be because of a legacy hardware that can't be provided to the VM; if he's installing it on a laptop then it's hard to think of what the hardware would be, other than that it's a portable device itself.
 
Thanks for the ideas

Thanks for the ideas

Hi, guys and/or gals.

Actually, I have tried MS VM and later Parallel Machine on one of my desktops. In both cases, the best graphics I could get was 4-bit color--that's worse than the VGA graphics I get now on my laptop.

I hadn't considered that my Insperion 7500 might postdate Win 3.1 by so much that there might be no support available at all. That may be the crux of my problem :( .

I still hope to figure a way to get SVG with 256 colors from the 3D Rage Mobility-P card on my I7500. Do any of you think that there might be a generic SVGA driver available? Something along the lines the Oak Technology offers for legacy CD-ROMS?

Thanks again for all of your ideas and expertise.
 
steves6161 said:
Hi, guys and/or gals.

Actually, I have tried MS VM and later Parallel Machine on one of my desktops. In both cases, the best graphics I could get was 4-bit color--that's worse than the VGA graphics I get now on my laptop.

I hadn't considered that my Insperion 7500 might postdate Win 3.1 by so much that there might be no support available at all. That may be the crux of my problem :( .

I still hope to figure a way to get SVG with 256 colors from the 3D Rage Mobility-P card on my I7500. Do any of you think that there might be a generic SVGA driver available? Something along the lines the Oak Technology offers for legacy CD-ROMS?

Thanks again for all of your ideas and expertise.
Click to expand...

OK, you can get it to run in 1024x768, 256 color mode in VMWare (along with crappy sound and crappy TCP/IP). I just threw it together:
50imbt.png


I tried to to goto Rage3d, but it crashes Netscape ;)

What you probably need is SVGA.exe. It's supposed to come with Win 3.11 WFW but I couldn't be arsed to find out what disk it was on, so I went to DriverGuide.net. That was my direct link for it. I'm not sure if it'll work for you. You may have to "view" several ****ty ads to get to the actual download screen being that driverguide has been quite lame for the last few years. They are a worthy source, however. With the number of virii going around these days, the pain in the ass of getting it from there may be worth it. I'm not sure if it will work on the Inspiron, but it's your best bet.

If you want to run it in a VM. Check out this site for the SVGA VMWare patch. It does seem to have some probs, but it works. This site has everything you need to get sound and internet working.

All I can say is, holy **** is Win 3.11 crap. I can't believe at one point in my life I thought it was awesome.

Best of luck.

Edit:

quagmire38659hq.jpg

256-color pr0n... giggity giggity gooooooo


2ikpfrb.png
 
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GAME OVER?? Does that mean that I can't play any more?

I think I'll at least try out SVGA.exe--thanks for the link. I might also try the VMWare solution except it looks to me like it costs $189. Have I missed something? Is there a free version?

Thanks again for the effort you put into this.

Steve
 
steves6161 said:
GAME OVER?? Does that mean that I can't play any more?

I think I'll at least try out SVGA.exe--thanks for the link. I might also try the VMWare solution except it looks to me like it costs $189. Have I missed something? Is there a free version?

Thanks again for the effort you put into this.

Steve
Click to expand...

VMware player is free, although you can't create a disk image with it, you can only run it, but it does have the same functionality.
 
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lol i couldn't help but notice this (after finding this thread via a google search).. in my opinion, if you can at least get Win2000 onto that laptop, MS Virtual PC 2004 would be the best tool, as you can get higher color modes (15/16/24-bit) through the emulated S3 Trio64 video card (and at blazing fast speed too).

DOSBox also works in higher color modes (using the S3 864 Win 3.11 driver), but it's slow as molasses, and unfortunately DOSBox doesn't have networking support under it as of yet.

I believe ATI released a Win 3.11 driver for the 3D Rage II chipsets, but I have doubts of them working.
 
http://win31.de/edrivers.htm

see if the ATI drivers on this page may work for you

also it is interesting to note that NVIDIA released a TNT/TNT2 driver for Windows 3.1x, albeit i have personally experimented with it in the past on an old PCI TNT2 M64 card and the driver is crap - can't go more than 5 minutes without the OS spitting back a GPF - probably released for testing purposes i guess
 
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