Help on Resolving Technical Problems


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:

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 not required to run the system. If this helps, reinstall different combinations of cards to see what 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 works, you may have a compatibility problem with the motherboard. For PCI products, update 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 Matrox 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 the problem persists, 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 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.
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) a 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 contact Matrox technical support, the following information may be required to help us provide you with a quick response:
Matrox 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 being used when the problem occured.
state the application name and version number.
describe the steps known to cause the problem so we can reproduce it.



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.

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:
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 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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