S3 Trio 64 - Driver Installation Problems

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Symptoms

Installation of the S3 drivers 2.52 ends with the error message "...invalid argument in dsc file(s). Check dsc file(s)." This problem was observed with Warp Connect blue spine (with Win-OS2).

Hardware

Display cards using the new S3 Trio 64 chipset.

Problem

It appears that the driver installation program renames any existing DSPINSTL.EXE and replaces it with an older version of the same file. There have also been reports that some versions of DSPINSTL.EXE will give a similar error if their are more than 24 .DSC files in the install directory.

Procedure

Open up an OS/2 command line session and change directories to the x:\os2\install directory. Do a dir dspinstl.*. There should be a dspinstl.sav that has a newer date then the dspinstl.exe. Rename the exe file and then rename dspinstl.sav to dspinstl.exe. Reboot the system and then try running dspinstl. When you are presented with the list of display drivers be sure to pick the "32 bit S3 drivers" from the top of the list. The drivers for the 805, 864, etc will not work with the Trio 64 chipset.

Notes

I obtained the 2.52 drivers from hobbes.nmsu.edu in the os2\drivers directory. My display card is a generic (Expert Color) card with the Trio 64 chipset, 1 meg of DRAM and a Phoenix bios. The Trio 64 chipset has an integrated DAC and clock.