3dfx Banshee + Diablo II + Glide = error message

[tcsenter]

A friend of mine has a PCI Diamond Monster Fusion (3dfx Banshee) and is trying to get Diablo II to run on Windows 98SE. The Video Setup Test runs fine and recommends 3dfx Glide, but also offers DirectDraw 2D as the alternative (oddly, it doesn't offer a Direct3D option at all). Diablo II recommends DX7.0a which is what is installed. I am using the latest video driver from Diamond.

When she starts Diablo II and begins playing, it gives an error message, something about "textcompression[something or another]: mipmap cannot span 2MB boundary". I click Ok and it throws a similar error but it is worded slightly different, still mentions 'mipmap cannot span 2MB boundary'. Then it freezes the whole system.

I went into Glide properties and found a setting that 'limits textures to 2MB', so I toggle that to enable it, then restarted, but it doesn't help. I SWEAR I've seen this error on another computer with a Diamond Monster Fusion a long time ago, and I thought that Glide setting corrected the issue, but it does nothing on this system.

I went to Blizzard's support site and searched around, but could find no topic resembling this error. Anyone seen this before? I haven't applied any Diablo update patches yet, but that's my next step.

Oh, BTW, DirectDraw 2D mode runs fine, and the image quality is virtually the same, but MUCH slower.

 

[AkumaBao]

Sounds like she needs new drivers.

 

[tcsenter]

Hi, well, there are no 'new' drivers from Diamond. She is using the latest available from Diamond, and if I remember correctly, the 3dfx reference drivers do not work properly on the Diamond Fusion.

There are only some 3rd party beta drivers (released by people with names like 'Executioner' or whatever) that I'm not really too confident about using. I did some searching and found a TON of people having the same problem, with Quake and other games, except out of three dozen newsgroup threads I've read there has been NO real solution offered.

Here is an excerpt from one newsgroup message that precisely describes the same problem I'm having with her computer:

<< I choose my character, playing in Single Player mode. I enter the camp
and talk to Warriv. Then I walk away to talk to other folk. I get about 10
steps and the screen goes black and the following message appears:

grTexDownloadMipMap: mipmap cannot span 2Mbyte boundary

Since I now have no mouse, I hit <Enter> for OK. A second message now appears:

grTexDownloadMipMapLevelPartial: mipmap level cannot span 2Mbyte boundary

At this point I have to <Ctrl><Alt><Del> the thing and force the program to
quit. >>

That was posted almost two years ago and nobody responded. Dang it!

Edit: Looking through the many newsgroup posts, it seems to happen more with Diamond cards but it is by no means limited to them. What's even more peculiar is there are many reports of people using the card just fine in 3dfxGlide or OpenGL mode for a few days, they shut down for the night, come back and without making any changes to their system, they suddenly receive this error and nothing resolves it (reinstall everything from drivers, Directx, game, to OS).

I suspect there may have been a lot of cards produced with marginal RAM chips or Texel unit that playing a few texture intensive games caused to fail.

 

[Nohr]

When I was using an AGP Diamond Monster Fusion, I always had problems in 98SE with Diamond's drivers. They always corrupted my IE install and resulted in black backgrounds on the taskbar and quicklaunch bar. Here's a screenshot.

3dfx's latest reference drivers worked perfectly for me, and Diablo II ran in Glide mode fine. Oh btw, it didn't give me a Direct3D option either, just 2D. Not sure why the reference drivers aren't working for you.

I've had luck with 3rd party drivers, but I don't remember which. Just kept trying them until I found something that worked well, but that was more in WinXP where I had a lot more problems getting glide to work.

 

[merlocka]

and if I remember correctly, the 3dfx reference drivers do not work properly on the Diamond Fusion.


Well, the Diamond drivers don't seem to be working to well either Give the reference drivers a shot, you might be suprised.

 

[tcsenter]

<< 3dfx's latest reference drivers worked perfectly for me, and Diablo II ran in glide mode fine. Oh btw, it didn't give me a Direct3D option either, just 2D. Not sure why the reference drivers aren't working for you >>

Ok, thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a try.

 

[tcsenter]

Ok, I installed the latest Banshee reference drivers from 3DFX (latest as of 2000) and Diablo II seems to work fine in Glide mode. Well, the error has went away, and I think the overall image quality is even slightly better than the Diamond drivers. But, Diablo II seems to play a bit 'jittery'. The game play is faster than 2D DirectDraw mode, due to the use of hardware acceleration in Glide, but the game play doesn't seem to be any 'smoother'. This is with a K6-2 450 and 64MB or SDRAM (maximum cacheable).

Anyway, I'll take it over the errors and freezing any day. Thanks for the all the tips.