Ancient GPU woes


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I am having problems with an ancient graphics card, I inherited an old P4 system with 8mb onboard graphics and decided to splash out on a ?5.00 card from ebay to make those slideshow window movements smoother

I bought an ATI RAGE 128 PRO ULTRA GL 32MB AGP

With the exception of the default XP driver, I can not find a driver for this anywhere, not even on legacy ATI site, the ATI RAGE 128 / PRO driver is not compatible, I'm guessing because its not the ULTRA GL version, and even drivers from dell claiming to be for this card are not compatible either

Head > Brick wall

I know I could leave it as the default driver, but I am wanting to use the s-video and composite ports on the card > tv and not having any CCC or whatever the Ati equivalent was will be difficult I think

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That is an ancient card... If I remember correctly, the Rage 128 series is was competed against the orginal Geforce cards and Voodoo 3+ series cards. You are looking at a GPU built back in 1998 (going off the top of my head). You should of spent money on getting a more recent AGP card. I think some of the last ATi ones were the R19** series cards. Chances are the GPU in your P4 could be faster or on-par with the Rage 128. :)

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That is an ancient card... If I remember correctly, the Rage 128 series is was competed against the orginal Geforce cards and Voodoo 3+ series cards. You are looking at a GPU built back in 1998 (going off the top of my head). You should of spent money on getting a more recent AGP card. I think some of the last ATi ones were the R19** series cards. Chances are the GPU in your P4 could be faster or on-par with the Rage 128. :)

Yea I know it is ancient :) But 32mb vs 8mb was my reasoning, nothing is slower than the onboard, trust me, I could draw with a crayon faster than that thing :p

It's not for games, just for video, and specs are plenty for that, I can play 720p youtube videos with it, just need the driver so I can connect the TV

EDIT - I was trying to get Ubuntu running with it earlier and it was worse than XP, by a lot, slideshow just moving windows around with 12.04

Any OS that can run XBMC would suit me :)

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1) unplug computer

2) open window

3) throw computer out

:p Or try this

LOL! Witty. I was about to post the same thing! :p That's all I've come up with too, I have an old AGP system with an older ATI AGP card I was searching for drivers for yesterday, found those and been cruising smooth in XP ever since. (not my machine, but a friends' old one)

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Thanks for the links, I had already tried the Official ATI ones with "No compatible adapter found in your system" message each time

XP had installed the Ultra GL one and was adamant it was keeping it

Everything I was scanning the card with was saying a different model, so pulled the card and a small sticker said "Rage 128 Pro w/tv"

Force installed the 128 Pro AGP X4 driver and the TMDS version and both seem to work fine, but I have no way of activating the S-VIDEO port without CCC

Any ideas on that one ? :D

---

You could try something like this:

http://www.innovativ....com/drivermax/

There are better ones out there, but they cost money. Not sure how well this freeware one works.

I even tried driver genius and it didn't think there were any drivers available for the card

Tired a few cnet ones and get the same result

The requested URL /drivers/manual/ATI/WXPR1286133279.exe was not found on this server.

But I've tried the driver its looking for and still says its the wrong one

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Rage 128... that bring back memories.

Sometimes in xp, with the old ati drivers, you have to run a utility to purge all left over traces of previous drivers, even after uninstalling.

I HATED the old ati drivers (pre-amd). There use to be utilities that did this.

There use to be a great site called rage underground devoted to ati and there video cards (rage 128 era), but I think the sites long gone.

Seems to be somewhat archived with the wayback machine.

http://wayback.archi...underground.com

(edit) Poking around the web, try using Xpert 2000 PRO drivers.

Edited by Jason Stillion
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Rage 128... that bring back memories.

Sometimes in xp, with the old ati drivers, you have to run a utility to purge all left over traces of previous drivers, even after uninstalling.

I HATED the old ati drivers (pre-amd). There use to be utilities that did this.

There use to be a great site called rage underground devoted to ati and there video cards (rage 128 era), but I think the sites long gone.

Seems to be somewhat archived with the wayback machine.

http://wayback.archi...underground.com

(edit) Poking around the web, try using Xpert 2000 PRO drivers.

lol yea the memories I had were lies, old stuff sucks :p

thanks, I`ll give all that a go after my tea, and a little while bringing my sanity back with a win 7 machine :D

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i know it sounds crazy, but have you try running windows 7 on that old PC? Windows 7 might have better drivers builtin for that card

Actually win 7 ran well on it before I bought the card, I had to use the XP drivers for the onboard gpu though

Think I`ll give 7 another try, can't be any worse than XP :p I was wanting to get some version of Linux running on it really but me + linux + old drivers = disaster

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LOL! Witty. I was about to post the same thing! :p That's all I've come up with too, I have an old AGP system with an older ATI AGP card I was searching for drivers for yesterday, found those and been cruising smooth in XP ever since. (not my machine, but a friends' old one)

There are newer GPUs (even in AGP) that will function better than that old AGP chipset - even from AMD.

For Windows XP or any recent Linux distro (since you mentioned XBMC), the Radeon 9xxx series or X1K series should be the lowest you should settle for (although even the original Radeon (7xxx series) will also do - however, this is so low-end you'd likely hate it).

I have one of each in AGP (original Radeon 7500, pulled from a Dimension GX series running XP (to be replaced with an AIW 8500DV after upgrading to Vista Home Premium), AIW 9700 Pro which uses a floppy-drive power feed, and an X1650 PRO AGP, which, ironically replaced the AIW; this last card connects via a Molex for auxiliary power). The latter two will even run in Windows 7 using the default drivers, though neither is supported by any flavor of Windows 8. Similar cards should be out there on eBay or CraigsList.

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This was just an experiment to give an old machine a small boost, card was ?3 and postage was ?2, so can't complain really :)

Thought it might be fun having some old hardware to play with, but me thinks I went a little over the edge with 'old' :p

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No luck so far, same problem as XP was giving, "No compatible adapter found"

I'm pretty sure its the 'Ati Rage 128 Pro' now, the Ultra gl drivers refuse to install but the 128 pro ones worked with XP

Problem is its a device manager install so I don't get the CCC with it, if I can find a driver that works with 7 I might have more luck getting s-video working via display properties, it has more options than XP's does

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