W98 only letting me use 16 colors... WHy?

[TandyMan100]

I reinstalled windows 98 on my computer, and not it is only letting me use 2 or 16 colors. Before I re-installed, it would let me use more. Is there some driver or something? Should I instal Plus! ? I need my 32-bit color!

[per]

I reinstalled windows 98 on my computer, and not it is only letting me use 2 or 16 colors. Before I re-installed, it would let me use more. Is there some driver or something? Should I instal Plus! ? I need my 32-bit color!

Step 1, get proper drivers designed for your video card.


Windows 98, and basically most versions of windows got a lot of drivers, however, the ones following Windows 98 seems to be outdated, even when Windows 98 was new.

[TandyMan100]

K', so i find the model of card, and then search online for the .inf file? Sounds easy enought :rolleyes:

[barythrin]

Basically correct, just the .inf file itself is sorta just an installation script/info file pointing to the other files in the driver directory telling windows if the device is this version grab this file and make these settings, if it's this other revision, make X changes.

But yeah, that's Windows saying "I don't know how to use this video card so I'm just going to give you basic colors" OR if you happened to have a very small amount of video memory it could be that your video card can't support that resolution AND amount of colors. However usually it's the driver issue.

- John

[TandyMan100]

I pulled out the card to get the name of it... Nothing definitive. Says:

Intel type:RHB740
Kalex K668

Has a big silver fan on the top. Doesn't look like anything that would come with the MB, considering that the MB is a 1999.


EDIT: after my last post, I put the card back into the computer, and fired it up. Nothing. Thinking "oh crap, did I just screw up my graphics card?". Nope. I just forgot to plug the monitor back in ;-)

[barythrin]

You can certainly google around for those names. In Windows though the trick I saw some old school guys do was go into a MS-DOS shell (start->run->command), type "debug" (no quotes of course), in debug type "d c000:0000" then hit d one more time and that will likely tell you a manufacturer and maybe a model name although there's a bunch of other date on the ROM like when it was burned, who it was written by, etc but it may give you a lead also.

"q" will let you quite debug. "d" is dump and you're giving it the memory address to dump which in this case is the usual location for your video card's BIOS chip.

It's not always but a lot of the time I see the card information start at around c000:0080.

[lutiana]

I googled
Intel type:RHB740

And found this:

http://members.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=63802

It looks like the driver you need.

[TandyMan100]

I found that. Crap. Just another thing to sign up for. :rolleyes:

[linuxlove]

if you don't mind ads, you can download drivers on driverguide for free...

[Vlad]

One thing you need to remember and love is when it comes to driver support, Intel is legendary.

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?strState=LIVE&ProductID=39&DwnldID=2907&agr=Y&lang=eng&PrdMap=39

They seriously have a Vista 64-bit driver for my Server adapter that was made in 1996.