Big time problems with Radeon 8500. Bad card or fixable problem?

You could have a go at re-flashing the bios. I've two Herculese 8500LE's -
got the bios from their web site. I didn't have the problem you describe -
but it did improve the performance of the card (second user).

Pete

"James A. Cooley" wrote in message
...
I bought a used Radeon 8500 a while back and finally got around to
installing it in a system. On a Windows XP machine, it gave me very dark
views for Deus Ex (but it ran), provided me with very strange
"drunk-o-vision" on the Half-Life Demo (kept looking at the ceiling), and
gave me an error message about not being able to find an OpenGL file it
needed for the demo for Star Trek Away Team II.

I switched it to another MB, this one running Windows ME. I got complete
psychodelic garble for Half-Life (neat to look at) and a fascinating
alternating blue screen and an absolutely crappy image on the startup
screen
for the Star Trek demo.

I suspect I just have a bad card (danger of buying used and not testing it
right away), but hope that there might be something else I have overlooked
that can fix the problem.

The first MB (ECS) used a Sis chipset and the second one (FreeTech) used
an
AMD 750, if that matters. I tried the newest Catalyst drivers and the
Windows XP attempt was on a fresh install of the OS.

I have another MSI MB I might try it with, but would like to have ideas
for
fixes before then.

Feel free to reply to cooley (at) io . com

--
________________________________
James A. Cooley
Learn all about Texas politics:
www.lonestarreport.org

I am willing to try it. Do you have a link to the instractions on how to do
it, BIOS files, and flash utilities.

The card is basically junk unless I get this fixed.

"Immuno" wrote in message
...
You could have a go at re-flashing the bios. I've two Herculese
500LE's -
got the bios from their web site. I didn't have the problem you describe -
but it did improve the performance of the card (second user).

Pete

"James A. Cooley" wrote in message
...
I bought a used Radeon 8500 a while back and finally got around to
installing it in a system. On a Windows XP machine, it gave me very dark
views for Deus Ex (but it ran), provided me with very strange
"drunk-o-vision" on the Half-Life Demo (kept looking at the ceiling),
and
gave me an error message about not being able to find an OpenGL file it
needed for the demo for Star Trek Away Team II.

I switched it to another MB, this one running Windows ME. I got complete
psychodelic garble for Half-Life (neat to look at) and a fascinating
alternating blue screen and an absolutely crappy image on the startup
screen
for the Star Trek demo.

I suspect I just have a bad card (danger of buying used and not testing
it
right away), but hope that there might be something else I have
overlooked
that can fix the problem.

The first MB (ECS) used a Sis chipset and the second one (FreeTech) used
an
AMD 750, if that matters. I tried the newest Catalyst drivers and the
Windows XP attempt was on a fresh install of the OS.

I have another MSI MB I might try it with, but would like to have ideas
for
fixes before then.

Feel free to reply to cooley (at) io . com

--
________________________________
James A. Cooley
Learn all about Texas politics:
www.lonestarreport.org