ufh logo Upgrades from Hell : Quake 3

On Friday evening I was farting about with the latest version of Quakeforge, the QuakeWorld Opensource effort (www.quakeforge.net), and having a great deal of difficulty getting it to work.

Whilst trying to fix it, I went to the MATROX site to see if there were new drivers for my Matrox G400MAX 32MB AGP video card for Windows 2000, and there was. So I downloaded them, and followed the instructions for installing them

1) uninstall old drivers (version 533)
2) reboot
3) install new drivers (version 551)

Things looked sweet, until I tried to run Quake 3 Arena -- which just unceremoniously dumped me back to the desktop whenever I tried to start a game. How strange!

So I tried Unreal Tournament, and it crashed Windows 2000 Pro completely with a 'kmode exception not handled' problem.

Well, fuck that for a joke, time to revert to the previously rock-solid 533 drivers.

* uninstall 551
* reboot
* install 533

Try Quake3, BANG, straight back to desktop.

Ugh.

I had broken my computer, and I was furious with Matrox for their buggy BETA drivers.

Downloaded the Microsoft Certified MATROX drivers (514) and installed them. Same result.

Ok, time for some research. I went to the Matrox forums, where I found more than a few people with VIA chipsets on their motherboards, were having significant problems with their video cards. Matrox suggest uninstalling drivers, getting the latest VIA 4in1 patch (version 429), installing that, then installing the Matrox drivers. So I did this.

Lo, the Via installation process BARFED half way through, and left me with a corrupted copy of the viaAGP driver. Windows 2000 wouldn't boot at all, not even in safe mode. I was way beyond pissed off, and in the 'dangerously close to heart attack due to extreme frustration' territory.

Managed to boot into Windows ME (thank goodness I hadn't deleted THAT) safe mode command prompt, and COPY the viaAGP driver to the WINNT\SYSTEM32 directory. That enabled me to boot. Got a whole bunch of errors that chkdsk fixed, then I re-ran the VIA 429 drivers, this time they worked.

Rebooted, installed new 551 Matrox drivers.

Run Quake 3. Crash and burn. Fuck it all.

Ok, time to get serious.

Go to Matrox site, and get their stand alone uninstall utility. Also get their latest unified BIOS so that I could flash the video card's EPROM with the latest thing.

Flashed the video card -- no problemo.

Ran the uninstall utility -- exactly the same as the windows uninstall process.

Install the Microsoft Certified drivers.

Run Quake 3. CRASH AND BURN. Sheesh.

Ok, time to do BIOS changes. Set AGP to 2x, disable AGP fast writes, and change video memory from USWC to UC.

Quake 3 still crashed.

Get the Matrox TWEAK utility. Turn off bus mastering. Reboot.

Quake 3 still crashed. Soldier of Fortune crashed back to desktop. Hardwar crashed back to desktop. Unreal Tournament got the dreaded kmode Exception Not Handled Blue Screen of Death, and the system rebooted. I tried to run Unreal Tournament again immediately afterwards, and it worked! I couldn't believe it. Tried Quake 3 Arena, and it worked too. Wow! Soldier of Fortune Worked. But I hadn't DONE anything EXCEPT run UT and let it crash. There was no driver change between the two attempts.

Ok, so something had worked.

Uninstall the ancient 514 drivers and install the latest drivers again (551).

Crash bang, no 3D games would work.

Grin to myself, AHAH!

uninstall 551 install 533 (the drivers I'd been running for weeks) Quake3 crashed and burned, but that's ok Run Unreal Tournament, let it die with Kmode Exception Not Handled error Reboot Run Quake3 and it -works-

WOW!

How STRANGE!

So then I rebooted again, and suddenly Quake3 didn't work again. Fuck me, I was so pissed off.

Perhaps it was a virus?

Play around some more with the Matrox Tweak utility, play around more with the motherboard bios settings. Nothing worked, went right back to 514 drivers, and even started uncompressing and replacing the G400ICD OpenGL driver manually in C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32 from the various directories of Matrox drivers. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Then I went to the Matrox Users Forum and wrote about my problems with the latest drivers. Some people instantly agreed that there were issues, other people said it was VIA chipset problems, and others said that their installs worked fine, and HAHA to you! (See link at bottom of this page)

The responses I got weren't particularly helpful, someone suggested that I turn off the Dual Head support (the G400MAX cards can run two monitors from the one card, but the feature doesn't work well in Windows 2000), but it was already off.

I went back to tinkering. I slowly closed programs down from Task Manager and tested Quake 3 each time.

After six single close - try - crash loops, I started to shut down multiple processes at a time, and suddenly, after killing a particular process, Quake 3 -started-.

The process -- Iolo Macro Magic.

BINGO!

In the last week, I had installed this little program to help me with some keystroke recording/replaying. I had completely forgot about it. Installing the 551 Matrox drivers was a fair while AFTER having installed Macro Magic, and it was the first time I'd played Quake3 for a while (I've been playing a heap of hearts on www.zone.com instead).

If I'd have tried Quake3 BEFORE I put the new drivers on, I would have almost immediately sussed the problem (the macro program). As it was, I went through a number of loops for no reason at all.

Just goes to show you that it's often the simplest things that are the cause of problems, and no amount of experience can help you if you blindly use the biggest hammer (BIOS upgrades, sheesh) you can find in order to solve problems.

matrox forum post

I'm now going to go back to my BIOS and undo all the changes I made, if I can remember them all. :)

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