On Tuesday 08 May 2001 13:09, Praedor Tempus wrote:
> I have this situation. I WAS able to run linux games like Heretic2, Myth2,
> and Terminus under linux, with hardware acceleration (Radeon 32MB DDR) back
> in March when I was running Mandrake 7.2, kernel-2.4.2, XFree86-4.0.2, and
> the March DRI-CVS. All worked great.
>
> Now, I have Mandrake 8.0, kernel-2.4.3, XFree86-4.0.3, and a very recent
> DRI-CVS build. The games don't run, but instead they wreck X. Heretic2
> would play on my Mandrake 8.0 system for a while if I ran it out of the
> box, with no patches (the patches worked fine with Mandrake 7.2). Unlike
> under Mandrake 7.2 and KDE 2.1, however, fullscreen mode fails to work in
> 8.0. Instead, the ONLY thing I get close to fullscreen mode, regardless of
> game settings, is a full-sized window. If started from a simple xterm, no
> window manager or environment, I get fullscreen gameplay. The unpatched
> game gets to a point at which it segfaults every time, but this is a game
> problem...hence the patches. Patching the game renders it totally
> unrunable in 8.0 but the patches were fine in 7.2.
>
> Myth2 ran fine in software mode (the only mode available to non-Voodoo card
> users at the time) in 7.2 with fullscreen but now in 8.0, with or without
> hardware rendering (a patch allowing OpenGL acceleration) it refuses to run
> and segfaults at startup.
>
> Terminus ran beautifully with hardware acceleration in 7.2 but now it is
> the worst of the lot. It crashes at startup and has even managed on a
> couple of occassions to bring my entire system down (it is OpenGL only). I
> haven't tried to run it again as a result.
>
> Because of the way these games crash, they either give ONLY an unhelpful
> "segmentation fault" and nothing else, or they lockup X so that even if
> there were any interesting messages of any use, I never get to see them
> because the only recourse is to hard reboot because I lose mouse and
> keyboard input. Terminus and Myth2 are the prime offenders of this type of
> crash though on a few occassions, I have seen an unhelpful "segmentation
> fault" from myth2.
>
> Civilme in a Mandrake list told me that this was an issue with
> XFree86-4.0.3 (probably in interacting with the Radeon). This, to me,
> would appear to then be both an XFree AND a DRI-CVS problem. XFree in some
> unknown way and DRI in regards to the Radeon driver (?)
>
> As I said, I NEVER get any useful log entries or messages on xterms when
> any of these games go down for the count and there are never any dumped
> cores. This makes it very hard (for me at least) to try to figure out
> precisely where the problem lay.
>
> Can anyone with perhaps more expertise or knowledge of this whole thing
> instruct me on ways I might track down the problem? Does anyone know of
> any specifics about a problem in the recent DRI-CVS code or XFree86-4.0.3
> in regards to the Radeon?
>
> I hesitate to run strace on one of these games because doing this on gears,
> a simple, uncomplicated app, brought X down real nicely. I grow weary of
> hard rebooting my system (and am a bit worried about continuing to do so).
>
> The best thing of all would be someone with a similar system who may not be
> having any of these problems letting me know - and maybe indicating details
> of their system that might differ from mine. I have an Athlon 700, AOpen
> AK72 mobo, Via KX133 chipset, 128MB ram, ATI Radeon 32 DDR AGP, Mandrake
> 8.0 (and the stuff mentioned previously).
Before doing anything else upgrade the BIOS on your motherboard to the most
recent. VIA Chipsets are highly suspect.
Civileme
