With a Trident TVGA 8900C video card and the Win31 drivers, at either 800 or
1024 (and probably also 640, did not try that) and 256 colors (the card won't
do more colors), when I start Windows it tells me:

TCPRAC  NTS0518  VNTSTID  Register failure

When I try to run Netscape 4.08 it tells me
WINSOCK
WSO0002- Local Status NCB failure  
Possible cause  
Network Telesystmes TCP stack not loaded
Invalid adaptor number


This card works perfectly with Arachne browser at 1024 - 256 colors.
Is there something wrong with it, or some peculiar conflict with Win31?

This is the third video card I had put into this computer.  The first two 
were fine with Win31 at 800 or 1024 256 colors.  Tseng ET4000 would only run
Arachne at 640 - 256 even after running the Tseng VESA driver.  Realtek 3106
runs Arachne at 1024 256 colors after running UNIVBE51, universal VESA 2.0,
but the latter takes up 8K free RAM and this prevents Arachne (with my
ISP, at least) from accessing websites after a while (it works on the first
few and quits in the middle of a large download).  This third card works
just fine with Arachne but refuses to work with Netscape and Winsock.

I have one other 8900C to try out, but is it worth bothering?  It is getting
to be rather a nuisance to keep opening up the computer.  The Trident works
find with Netscape as plain VGA so maybe there is something on the board that
went bad in the video RAM used for higher resolution?  But if so why does it
work okay with Arachne?  Is there maybe some memory conflict?  I have
nothing in config.sys except himem.sys and something about a RAM drive.

The Trident manual says this card  should work at 1024 256 colors, interlaced
or non-interlaced.  

5 responses total.

As I mentioned in Agora, I have the same problem in two computers with two
8900C cards.  If I install any of the Trident TVGA 8900C drivers (anything
with 256 colors) it messes up system.ini.  I can fix windows by copying over
a backpu version of system.ini, but I cannot get Trident to act as SVGA in
Windows without that register failure message.  What might the video drivers
have done to system.ini?  They put a line in it about VNTSTID and I think it
was registers=255.  Why would the Trident drivers do that?

The line that was put into system.ini of WIndows is
[VNTSTIMD]  NumTCBs=255.  What do all these acronyms refer to?  
One trident chip was 8900C, the other 8900CL, and I tried what I thought were
the appropriate drivers.  Andy suggests that NTS0158 is a chip on the trident
board that Windows is looking for, but may not be on that particular board.
The C runs Arachne at 1024-256 colors, the CL only as plain VGA.

Netscape has files called vntstimd.exe and vtcprac.exe.  So the trident
drivers appear to be doing something to system.ini that affects Netscape.
We have run Netscape on these computers, with different video cards.

The trident driver that was causing problems was ntrident.zip, downloaded from
driverguide (contributed by a member).  I found tvgaw31b (and a, which
duplicates b) at winsite and installed it instead and it works just perfectly
with both cards.  Claims to be the latest trident driver.  ANother reason to
use winsite instead of driverguide is that the first driver apparently brought
monkey.b virus with it, which I suspect may have been causing our problems.
ANother driverguide download of a realtek driver also had monkey.b.  Dr.
Solomon fixed two computers and two diskettes (and gave three other computers
certificates of health, along with about 30 other diskettes.......).

All the other video cards with at least 512K that we have will work for
NewDeal after running univesa.zip, loaded high, with smartdrive also loaded.
Same for Arachne.

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