Trident Video Cards and OS/2 Warp

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Symptoms

Hardware

Various Trident cards including at least 8900's and 9400's

Problem

Procedure

1. Use custom install option and install the system with the plain VGA driver rather than the Trident driver it selects by default.

   Then, from a DOS full-screen session:

   1. Extract the file "TRIWARP.ZIP" [or the original driver file downloaded from the Trident BBS (+1-415-691-1016)] onto a floppy.

   2. Change to A: drive and type "INSTALL D:" (OS/2 is installed on drive D: on my system). Insert display driver disks 1 & 2 into drive A: when prompted.

   3. Exit the DOS window, open full-screen OS/2 command session.

2. Type "DSPINSTL".

3. Select Primary display, then select the Trident SVGA driver from the list.

4. Select the install for default monitor option.

5. Select the screen resolution desired.

6. When the source dir prompt appears, change the directory from A:\ to D:\TROS2DRV (where the install script put the drivers).

7. Wait for install to finish and reboot. It came up in 800x600x256.

Notes

I found a file called OS230.ZIP, which has worked successfully with my 9400 cxi card under Warp...

I obtained it from the JATON BBS in the US (001 1 408 263 8529) - contains a number of drivers and a reasonably intelligble readme file.

I have uploaded the latest Trident 9440 drivers (dated 1st January, 1995) to the ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/incoming/ directory. The file names are os2_9440.ZIP and os2_9440.txt (the readme file).

These drivers work in 640X480 16 and 256 color mode with settable refresh rate to support your monitor.

...with a little diligence and patience I was finally able to get the drivers to install. It required creating a directory on the OS/2 hard drive to copy the original OS/2 Display driver diskettes. The instructions [supplied with TRIWARP.ZIP] are a little confusing and often refer to the OS/2 CD. Well if a user doesn't have a CD and the floppy drive is being used to install the Trident drivers then you must configure another way for the original OS/2 drivers to be found. Hopefully this will help you if anyone else needs assistance.

I installed Warp using diskettes made from the Warp Connect CD. When I tried to install the Trident drivers (TRIWARP.ZIP obtained from an FTP site), the Trident installation script complained about not being able to find dspres.dl_ and ibmvga32.dl_ on Device Driver diskette #1. Then, when I ran dspinstl.exe, it too complained about being unable to find those files in F:\TROS2DRV.

Here is how I got around that problem. Because the installation procedure seemed to be trying to load stock IBM files, I assumed that the files that had been installed for vanilla VGA were the ones that Trident wanted to use. I was trying to install the drivers for 600x800x256, so I edited the file F:\TROS2DRV\TR600BC.DSP to remove the two lines that referred to dspres.dl_ and ibmvga32.dl_, and reran dspinstl.exe. It worked flawlessly, and I now have 600x800x256 for both the OS/2 desktop and full-screen Windows.

One other consideration: The Trident installation procedure looks for the presence of \os2\mdos\winos2\win.com on the boot drive to determine whether to install drivers for OS/2 Full Pack or OS/2 for Windows. If you have installed Win-OS/2 on a partition other than the boot partition, this test will fail, and you will always get the OS/2 for Windows drivers. I had to modify the file install.bat to look on the right partition for win.com.