Celestia Forums

When i try to change the "Select Display Mode" to anything except Windows mode... i get a completely scrambled image.

win98SE
600Mhz
256Mb RAM
16Mb Diamond Stealth III S540 for Windows 98





i don't know if this is the kind of thing anyone can help me with here...
the Diamond web site for my graphics card doesn't seem to make any sense... i have no idea how to get updated drivers for my card. When i try to click on the driver download for my card it brings me to a totally different thing and begins downloading the WRONG drivers.... also what is the difference between drivers and bios for a graphics card? Does anyone know how to help me find the RING drivers for my card????????

Well your video card uses the S3 Savage 4 video chipset. The problem your seeing is probably because of a bad OpenGL IDC. Thats the driver programs use to draw in OpenGL. Most S3 Savage cards are not good for at doing much in OpenGL. I deal with a great many of these cards because the computer shop I work at bought a shit load of them from Diamond when they were closing there local facilities. So you could say I am very familiar with the ins and outs of these cards. You can get the last drivers that were officaily written by Diamond/SonicBlue at http://www.sonicblue.com/support/diamon ... h_III_S540
If you do a seaarch of the web you can find some sites that host 3rd party drivers that have been tweaked for better OpenGL performance. But be warnned that these drivers may not work right for your card and there is a posibility that they the 3rd party drivers could overclock your card and eventualy kill it. I am not saying that this will happen but its a possiblity. Also you can check the drivers at http://www.savagenews.com/drivers/drivers.php
I would get a utility that that can tell you exactly what chipset you have. There were a few different S3 Savege4 chipsets so you need to know which one you have be absoluty shure you get the drivers .Off the top of my head I think they used the S3 Savage 4Pro but again I can't be sure without damaging one of the cards I have here just to pop the heatsink and check. I would try the system utility call SySoftSandra. It can probe your hardware pretty good and tell you what you have and then you can download the nearest set of newer or 3rd party drivers for your card. I am sorry I can give you better news than this but your work has just started I'm afraid.

i looked for sysoftsandra but could not find it. Also, I downloaded what I thought was the right drivers for this device... however it downloaded some other drivers >> Diamond Stealth III/Speedstar A200 for Windows 95.

Well those are probably the right ones then. You can use Win95 drivers in Win98 if there aren't any others. The Stealth III and the SpeedStar A200 were almost identicle cards. The main diference was the SpeedStar used a slower clocked chip and I believe it used EDO VRAM instead of SDRAM.
As it stands I don't think you are going to have much luck using Celestia with this card. I laoded Celestia on a machine in our shop with the proper OpenGL IDC driver and Celestia was less than impresive. I was very disapointed in how it looked and worked. The whole Savage line of chipsets was always created to be DirectX/Direct3D compatible. OpenGL support was a second thought if it was even that. This chipset was made at a time when microsoft was trying its best to kill off OpenGL. They didn't succeed but you got stuck with one of the many video chipsets that were made for this purpose and as a side effect you can't properly render any OpenGL graphics. I would look for another video card. Good Luck.