Is there some way to stop the Radeon 9600 freeze-ups in FS2004?

[Worrybird]

As a newcomer to the Radeon club, I have a strong urge to drop kick it back
to the store. I would be overwhelmingly happy if the screen flickering was
all that was wrong with it... I envy you guys.

This thing freezes in FS2004. It freezes if you put up the frame rate
counter. It freezes in 30 sec if you put up the "Select Aircraft" window.
Sometimes it freezes just for fun. If you are really gentle with it you can
get 30 minutes of flight out of it.

FS2002 runs pretty well with an occasional freeze up.

I'd like to keep the card because the screen output is excellent.

I am running the ATI Radeon 9600 with the CATALYST Windows 98/ME 3.6 drivers
on a Windows 98 platform with a AMD Barton 3200 with 768 megs of PC3200 and
a brand new Antec 350w power supply.

So, is there a magic setting I can use to stop this madness?

 

[Mike Davis]

If you've spent all that money on hardware, why run Win98 with a Barton?? I
think these newer ATI drivers are XP specific aren't they?

 

[Carl Sellars]

As a newcomer to the Radeon club, I have a strong urge to drop kick it back
to the store. I would be overwhelmingly happy if the screen flickering was
all that was wrong with it... I envy you guys.

This thing freezes in FS2004. It freezes if you put up the frame rate
counter. It freezes in 30 sec if you put up the "Select Aircraft" window.
Sometimes it freezes just for fun. If you are really gentle with it you
can get 30 minutes of flight out of it.

FS2002 runs pretty well with an occasional freeze up.

I'd like to keep the card because the screen output is excellent.

I am running the ATI Radeon 9600 with the CATALYST Windows 98/ME 3.6
drivers on a Windows 98 platform with a AMD Barton 3200 with 768 megs of
PC3200 and a brand new Antec 350w power supply.

So, is there a magic setting I can use to stop this madness?

I have a Radeon 9600 Pro which I am very happy with. I am sorry to hear that
your experience isn't as good as mine has been .... yet. There are two things
which spring to mind here that I can think of which may assist you.

- Have you previously been using an NVidia card and then installed the Radeon
9600? If so then you would be well advised to ensure that you've cleaned
out all, and that does mean all, of the Nvidia entries in the registery and
any other bits of the NVidia drivers which my be left over. Doing an
unistall from the control panel or using NVidia's routine in usually not
enough! There are plenty of tools to do this for you which I'm sure a quick
search on Google will find.

- I don't believe that any flavours of Windows 98 or ME will run correctly
with more than 512Mb of RAM available to the OS. It is possible to set the
allocation of memory for Windows use down to this level if you have more
memory than this installed in the machine, but never having had to do this
I do not know how it's done. Usually this is a solution adopted by people
who are dual booting between Windows 2000 or Windows XP and an earlier
version of Windows, who require the additional memory for use in the newer
OS. Once again Google is likely to yield the detailed answer which you
seek.

I hope that this proves to be helpful.

Good luck,

--
Carl

"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids,
we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and
listening to repetitive electronic music."
-- Anon

 

[Worrybird]

If you've spent all that money on hardware, why run Win98 with a Barton??

You're not the first to ask... the answer is I am so embedded into 98, it
would take months to move everything back into place with XP.

ATI drivers are XP specific aren't they?

Na.. The box says Win98 and the website calls them Windows 98/ME so it's
still "supported".

So, they say it should work...

 

[JAD]

close every damn uneeded background program.....as someone said clear old drivers out....i like to go into safemode then the device
manger and clear all ghost drivers of hardware no longer used on the system. The over 512 meg memory thing can be solve by entering
a line in the vcache entry in sys.ini.

 

[Kent_Diego]

I would be overwhelmingly happy if the screen flickering was

all that was wrong with it...

Change refresh rate to higher setting.

with 768 megs of PC3200 and

Using more that one RAM module can sometimes cause problems. Run Memtest86
to check.

-Kent

 

[Worrybird]

close every damn unneeded background program
Yep, did that. - No Effect

The over 512 meg memory thing

Changed the msconfig>Advanced>Limit memory to 768 - No Effect
Took out a stick of Ram - No Effect
Checked the Ram with SiSoft - OK

I seem to be able to run it at 800x600x16 ---- it feels like the driver
doesn't like FS2004

Sigh!

Is anyone else having a lock up problem or is it just me?

close every damn uneeded background program.....as someone said clear old

drivers out....i like to go into safemode then the device

manger and clear all ghost drivers of hardware no longer used on the

system. The over 512 meg memory thing can be solve by entering