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Thinkpad 770X - Some questions

Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2015 6:41 am
by geka3250
Hi!
Finally I got HHD case for my TP770X and bring it to life :) It is the model with PII-300, 512mb RAM, Trident 3D 8mb, 1280x1024 screen.
Installed WINXP and have a problem with display - I can set only 16bit color at 1280x1024. Lets do some calculations of framebuffer size for 1280x1024 at 32bits:
1280*1024*32=41943040(bits)/8=5242880(bytes)/1024=5120(kbytes). Trident has 8192kbytes of videomemory, which enough for this mode.
Also this videocard has 3D acceleration, but XP driver doesn't support it. Does anybody have a good driver for XP with 3D?
Thanks!

Re: Thinkpad 770X - Some questions

Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2015 9:24 am
by MisterB
I never put Xp in mine but Windows 2000 works normally and the W2k driver probably works with XP. I would check and make sure the right driver is installed. Xp might have put in a MS supplied driver.

Re: Thinkpad 770X - Some questions

Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2015 2:36 pm
by geka3250
MisterB,
Can you try running some 3D stuff like XL-R8R or 3DMark99/2000 please? Youtube shows 3D works on 770Z with WIN98.

Re: Thinkpad 770X - Some questions

Posted: Sun Mar 15, 2015 10:33 am
by geka3250
Also monochrome display is useful thing on this machine. But can I configure it? To show time or anything other?

Re: Thinkpad 770X - Some questions

Posted: Sun Mar 15, 2015 4:46 pm
by MisterB
Ok, I fired up the 770X. I'm not up to putting any new software on it. My 770X multiboots Windows 98, NT4, 2000, MSDOS 6.22 with Windows 3.1, OS/2 Warp 4 and 4.5 and Suse Linux 7.3. Its original OS was NT 4.0. In all of these OSes, the GPU could only do 16 bit SXGA and 32 bit XGA. All of them except Linux use IBM supplied drivers. It's been a long time and I'd forgotten about that limitation. The last time I really did anything with it was around 2006 or 2007. I've kept it because of all the work I put into getting the extreme partitioning and multibooting to work. It was something like my masters thesis in mulitibooting. I'm sure it can do some sort of 3D but more than likely in XGA mode. I do find this weird because a GPU with that much memory should be able to do 32 bit SXGA but there is obviously something else in the chip that restricts it. Windows 98 is probably the best bet for 3D acceleration.

I bought my 770X just after the turn of the millennium from a computer programmer along with his MSDN subscription. I never did anything with the MSDN software beyond setting up the IDE. It did give me every bit of MS software up to the year 2000 which is what I used to set up the 770X with all the different versions of Windows. I later added the video processor board which is necessary to play DVDs and might be helpful in getting the 3D acceleration to work. It added video in and out with a custom IBM dongle. The video digitizer was pretty weak and lo rez.