how to remove inactive display entries?

[jschmidt]

I have a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI graphics accelerator running under Windows 98SE. My games that require 3D acceleration work fine, except for one. Freespace 2 can't detect the card. The 3dfx logo appears briefly, then the system exits from the setup menu.

I've contacted the manufacturer, who noted that my DirectX diagnostics detect "inactive display entries in the registry" for "Standard PCI graphics adapter (VGA)" and the driver vga.drv. They suggested that removing these inactive entries is the first thing to try to solve this problem. I found an entry in the Windows registry for "standard PCI graphics adapter" and removed it. This didn't seem to help, as DirectX diagnostics still finds the inactive display entries in the registry.

Does anyone know how to solve this problem?

[Praetorian]

Not sure how to solve your problem but I really don't think removing inactive display drivers is going to help at all. Try reinstalling the drivers for your Voodoo3.

[Kruzin]

Boot into safe mode, and go to your device manager.
In safe mode, you will be able to see any inactive and duplicate display device, and you can remove them from there.

[bigstep_70]

check out there registry KEY's for old/bad values
(only if you're comfortable with manual registry editing)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\PCI (only if you have pci gfx card...which i do.)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\AGP (more than likley your old card will appear here)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Class\Display (...and here for sure)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Config\000*\Display (the * could be any value)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\MONITOR (for problems with moniter listings)


...hope this helps you out , but don't take my word for it.

[jschmidt]

Just to wrap this up, I did finally get this problem solved.

As bigstep_70 suggested, there was another reference to an inactive display in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\ Class\Display. Removing this got rid of the inactive display entries, but didn't fix the problem.

What finally worked was changing the resolution from my normal 1024x768 to 640x480, and then asking the game's setup routine to detect the accelerator card. I don't recall having to do this before, but I won't argue with success.