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Дата изменения: Thu Oct 5 03:33:00 1995
Дата индексирования: Mon Dec 24 10:55:07 2007
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Help on Resolving Technical Problems

This document outlines procedures for resolving technical problems due to
conflicts, installation or configuration of MGA products. Most problems
fall into 3 categories: hardware installation, software errors, and video
configuration.

The goal of troubleshooting is to identify which component or aspect of
your computer system is causing difficulties. A process of elimination
based on trial and error is often necessary and may take a great deal of
time. Make sure you have checked the manual for any information that could
help. The following information is meant to help you isolate and identify
these problems.

Hardware Installation

If you experience problems booting your system or starting one of the
operating systems or applications supported by our drivers, then you may be
experiencing a problem related to hardware installation. Other symptoms may
include random crashing of the system or no video output on your monitor.
To help isolate the problem try the following steps:

1) Try a clean boot of your system to see if anything in AUTOEXEC.BAT or
CONFIG.SYS files is causing the problem. With DOS 6.X, this is done by
pressing F5 during boot-up. If this helps try pressing F8 while booting the
system and step through the CONFIG.SYS to try and isolate the problem. For
earlier versions of DOS, the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files need to be
renamed temporarily. Pay special attention to the memory manager if you are
using one. The memory manager must exclude the memory area used by the MGA
adapter as well as other memory-mapped devices such as BIOS EPROMs.

2) For a hardware conflict or if the system won't boot, try removing all
peripheral cards that are not absolutely required to run the system. If
this helps, add different combinations of cards back to see which is
causing the conflict. Do not overlook peripherals on the motherboard such
as video or network chips. These usually can be disabled by the system
configuration software. You should also try disabling video BIOS shadowing
or memory caching of memory addresses to see if this is causing the
conflict.

3) If you are using PCI-based products, the system will auto-configure the
boards addresses. This usually prevents conflicts with other PCI or plug-
and-play devices. Some system BIOS do not handle this correctly however and
may map 2 PCI boards to the same address.

4) For intermittent problems, erratic behavior, or when nothing will work,
you may have a compatibility problem with the motherboard. For PCI
products, get an update to the system BIOS. For VL-, AT-, and MCA-based
products, try the board in a another system which uses a different
motherboard.

Technical specifications for MGA products are provided at the end of this
document.
Software Problems
For problems with software applications or drivers, try reconfiguring the
graphics adapter to run VGA. If the problem persists, the problem is either
with the application or the operating system. Contact the software vendor.
If the problem disappears, it may be a problem with the MGA driver. Try
updating the driver to the latest version to see if the problem is
resolved. If you still cannot resolve the problem, you should report it to
our technical support department.
Video Configuration
Video monitor problems are usually caused by mis-matches of the monitor and
the chosen monitor profile. They are usually characterized by no video on
the monitor (this could also be due to the system hanging) or un-
synchronized video. If no monitor profile is available for your monitor you
may need to chose a generic multi-frequency monitor profile. Before doing
this, make sure you know what the maximum horizontal and vertical
frequencies of your monitor. Exceeding these frequencies could damage your
monitor. Here are some tips on choosing a new monitor profile.

a) If you have a fairly new monitor, check your monitor's documentation to
see if it supports VESA monitor frequencies. We supply 3 monitor profiles
of VESA frequencies.
b) If your monitor is a small (14 inches or less) or less expensive model,
or fairly old (more than 3 years) then select a 60 Hz monitor profile.
c) If neither of the above works, obtain the maximum vertical and
horizontal frequencies of your monitor from its documentation. Then, use
the Monitor Selection program in advanced mode (this runs in VGA mode) to
see if the vertical and horizontal frequencies for any resolution and pixel
depth of the selected monitor profile are suitable for your monitor. Both
the maximum horizontal and vertical frequencies of the monitor must exceed
the frequencies shown by the monitor selection program for the resolution
you want to select.
d) If you have one of the older fixed-synchronization monitors, you will
need to select the correct frequency and resolution for startup. Choose the
60Hz monitor profile.
Information Required by Technical Support
If you need to contact technical support, the following information may be
required to help us provide you with a quick response:
- MGA product model number, base address mapping, board revision, BIOS
revision.
- computer model, bus type, processor, memory, motherboard, chipset, and
system BIOS.
- a list of the other boards and peripherals installed in the system.
- brand and model of monitor if the problem is video-related.
- operating system (DOS, OS/2, or Windows NT) type and version.
- contents of your autoexec.bat and config.sys files.
- for Windows problems, the contents of win.ini and system.ini files.
- note which resolution, pixel depth and MGA features were in use at the
time of the problem.
- state the application name and version number.
- give detailed steps that are known to cause the problem so we can
reproduce it.

MGA Product Technical Specifications

The following information is provided to assist you with hardware
installation problems. MGA products are memory-mapped. They only use I/O
addresses when running in VGA or VESA modes. These are the standard VGA I/O
addresses.

MGA on PCI Bus (Millennium, Impression Plus, Impression Lite, Impression,
Ultima Plus, Ultima):

RAM Address: Auto-configured by system BIOS. The MGA Millennium uses a 16
Kbyte window and an 8 Mbyte window mapped above 1 Mbyte. Other MGA products
on PCI bus only use the 16 Kbyte window.

MGA products on VL, AT and MCA bus (Impression Plus, Impression Lite,
Impression, Ultima Plus, Ultima):

RAM Address: Requires 16 Kbyte window from 1 of 7 user-configurable base
addresses - AC00, C800, CC00, D000, D400, D800, and DC00. Default is AC00.

Integrated VGA controller:

Each MGA has an integrated VGA controller which is used for booting the
computer and running VGA and VESA compatible programs. The MGA Millennium
is a 32 bit VGA while other MGAs use an 8 bit VGA core. They use the
following addresses:

IO address: 3B4, 3B5, 3BA, 3C0-3CF, 3D4, 3D5, 3DA, 3DE, 3DF
RAM address: A000-BFFF, ROM address: C000-C7FF, Interrupt: 9

Note 1: MGA VL bus products operate reliably with a bus frequency less than
or equal 33 Mhz.
Note 2: MGA AT bus products can be set to 8 or 16 bit operation and should
be the same as other adapters with RAM or ROM mapped into the range from
C000-DFFF.
Note 3: Do not use the AC00 address running OS/2 with MGA VL, AT and MCA
products.
Note 4: The VGA on Ultima and Ultima Plus for PCI and VL models uses all IO
addresses from 3B0 to 3BF which conflicts with the third parallel port on
many systems