Help on Resolving Technical Problems
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This document helps resolve technical problems due to conflicts, installation or configuration of Matrox products. Most problems fall into 3 categories: |
Hardware installation, Software problems, 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.
Also in this document you'll find: |
Information Required by Technical
Support and Matrox Product Technical
Specifications |
Hardware Installation | ||||||||
If you experience problems booting your system, starting operating systems
or opening applications supported by our drivers, 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:
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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 the
problem persists, report it to our
technical support
department.
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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
choose a generic multi-frequency monitor profile. Before doing this, make sure
you know what the maximum horizontal and vertical frequencies of your monitor
are. Exceeding these frequencies could damage your monitor. Here are some tips
on choosing a new monitor profile.
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Information Required by Technical Support | ||||||||||||||||||||
If you contact Matrox technical support, the following information may be required to help us provide you with a quick response: | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Matrox Product Technical Specifications |
The following information is to help you with hardware installation problems. Matrox 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. |
Matrox 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 Matrox products on PCI bus only use the 16 Kbyte window. |
Matrox 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.
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Integrated VGA controller: |
Each Matrox graphics accelerator has an integrated VGA controller used for
booting the computer and running VGA and VESA compatible programs. The Matrox
Millennium is a 32 bit VGA while other MGAs use an 8 bit VGA core. They use the
following addresses:
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IO address: 3B4, 3B5, 3BA, 3C0-3CF, 3D4, 3D5, 3DA, 3DE, 3DF RAM address:
A000-BFFF, ROM address: C000-C7FF, Interrupt: 9
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Note 1: MGA VL bus products operate reliably with a bus frequency less than
or equal to 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 |
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