Getting started

Velocity9x is a from-scratch display driver for Windows 98. It is an engineering driver: every card’s results come from one physical machine (two for the S3 Trio64), and a failed install leaves Windows unable to display until you recover it. Treat these steps as a test procedure, not a consumer install.

1. Find out whether your card is supported

Look your card up in the hardware database. Search by model or by PCI ID. Device Manager shows the PCI ID under Display adapters → Properties → Details, as PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27AE, which the database writes as 8086:27AE.

• Verified working: run on a physical machine for the interfaces listed.
• Recognised, untested: the driver installs on it by design, but nobody has run it yet. Your report would be the first.
• Not listed: try the generic vbe package, and send a hardware survey so a native family can be built.

2. Pick the right package

Velocity9x ships one zip per chip family: intel-gma, ati, s3, matrox, nvidia, sis, 3dfx and vbe. A family’s driver serves every chip in it and picks the right one by PCI ID at boot. The downloads page lists which zip covers which card.

3. Prepare a way back

• On a virtual machine (86Box is the best-tested environment), shut Windows down completely and copy the disk image.
• On real hardware, take a full disk image. At minimum, confirm the machine boots with the Standard PCI Graphics Adapter (VGA) driver, and know how to reach Safe Mode (F8 before Windows starts).

4. Install, then verify

Follow Installation. The short version: install over the top of the current driver with Have Disk, shut down fully, and cold-start once.

5. Tell us what happened

Good and bad results both move cards up the list. See Hardware testing and bug reports, and if you have a machine the drivers don’t support yet, consider lending it through remote help.