I accidently flashed my *$@^ing Savage4 Bios with a Generic One & Screwed mine all up! What can I *$@^ing do?

Point taken, me thinks. I saw over at GXS in March a way to fix your Savage4 (or Savage2000) card using a few simple steps. First take out your S3 card and replace it with one that works. Make a TSR Bios by using this tool: ftp://s3.nextmill.com/bios/maketsr.zip or any TSR Make Program. Make a boot disk, copy the TSR Bios to the disk, and make an autoexec.bat to run the TSR Bios. Now, in the computer setup after rebooting, set the primary display to ABSENT. Now put the busted S3 card back in and load the boot disk. Now you should be able to flash your *$@^ing screwed up card with no *$@6ing problem! See, nothing to worry about...

Here's a hint for all S3 users out there: ONLY flash your S3 card with YOUR MANUFACTURER's BIOS! The Generic Bioses work only 1 out of 6 times or less. Don't waste a perfectly good card to satisfy your overclocking needs...

Oh, by the *$@^ing way, BiPolar's wonderful tweaked driver set contains vgabios.exe which lets you know if the new bios that you're trying out works with your *$@^ing S3 card, but it doesn't tell you if you'd ever be able to flash back to your old one afterwards...

What are all those Tweaked Drivers for? Are they actually better than those beautiful drivers that S3 releases?

Huh? S3 actaully releases drivers, eh? Who could ever notice, eh? Well, I try to use Tweaked driver sets but for some odd reason, my Win95 locks up a few seconds into Windows when I use ANY driver set other than the Creative Labs one... it could be my i430VX motherboard or I could've put my S3 into the wrong PCI slot or maybe I keep downloading Win95 incompatible drivers by fluke, but I guess I just won't know until I upgrade... Anyways, you can probably find all of the tweaked driver sets at SDN or GXS, the two best S3 sites, but here's a list of the best tweaked driver sets out there:

BiPolar - is this guy a S3 god or what? Everybody uses his driver set so why not follow the crowd and use it too? His goal is the opposite of the S3 programmers: stability. BiPolar doesn't really care about getting a game to just start and look pretty until it crashes - he cares about getting it to run 7 bloody hours straight without crashing and he has come pretty damn close to his goal. His 1.00P driver has pretty low compatibility (I'm not sure which reference its based on), but it's should be completely stable in Unreal Tournament.

Rizen - Rizen's was the first tweaked driver set that I ever tried. Rizen has worked incredibly long on perfected his drivers and although I can't say they're the MOST stable (although I know many out there will disagree with me), he supports many more S3 boards out there than BiPolar. I thought that Rizen might work on my computer... damn, that's two strikes so far. Rizen's drivers used to be the fastest of them all, but BiPolar's performance patch may have taken the crown...

Fachman - Then again, the old grand-daddy of S3 programming may deserve the speed crown afterall... Fachman has been working on S3 drivers since the Savage3d so he knows a hell of a lot when it comes to S3 systems. He might as well get a job at Diamond or something. His drivers aren't that stable, me thinks, but they're made for performace so if the other drivers don't do the trick for you, go with Fachman. At least he has the determination to keep his updates going... or did I talk too soon?...

SavageOnline - I'm not sure what they have to offer but they're the only other group that's still pumping out those Savage4 tweaked driver sets so keep up the good work, SavageOnline! Don't give up, no matter how long ago it was since S3 did so!

SavageUnderground - I don't even know who these people are let alone what they do special, but as long as they support S3, we should support them. Woo hoo!

Other Tweaked Drivers: Rebum, Phido, Kenshin & Tim Tweaked - I have no clue what's special about these. I remember Rebum lasted a little while so his drivers might be worth a look, but the other two didn't last long so let's let them rest in peace, shall we?

What do we do if we Can't use a Tweaked Driver? What if the driver keeps friggin' freezing on us?

Then do what me must do and overwrite our manufacturer's files with S3 reference ones. Install the lastest driver from your manufacturer (for Creative Labs, its version 1.04) & if you're in the mood for more problems, you might as well flash your bios with your manufacturer's newest too. Then extract the tweaked driver set to a temp directory and copy these files to your \windows\system directory: S3_8.dll, S3_refre.dll, S3_8.drv, S3vdd8.vdx, the miniGL & the Performance ICD. If there are any other files yuo can find to replace, by all means do so, but I overwrote everything that I could and then my Windows wouldn't start, so do your overwriting one file at a time. If all goes well, your games will run smoother with better graphics, better fps, and hopefully, better stability... yeah, that's an April fools joke if I've ever heralded one...

If you want to get your S3 working perfectly enough to install the Tweaked Drivers normally, you can try switching your S3 to a different PCI or AGP slot (wait, there's just 1 AGP slot isn't there... don't stare at me like I'm dumb or something, I'm just outdated...) to fix IRQ or priority problems. Or you can install the drivers and make sure you disable sidebanding & AGP texturing at once (lots of cards have problems with these). You can also go to your motheboard's manufacturer's website & update your AGP drivers. A lot of Via boards seem to mess up with S3 AGP. If this doesn't work, try installing a clean boot of Windows or set up a dual boot system. This will leave your \system directory clean of any conflicting files. Also, before you install new drivers, its best to go to safe mode and uninstall the old ones, although my computer just freezes either way...

Dweak? What the hell is a dweak and why the hell did you name your Webpage after it?

Dweaks are simply S3 tweaks that haven't made it into S3Tweak yet, or at least, not at the time I write this... The first dweak is AGP4x. Even though the S3 Savage4 is AGP2x, enabling AGP4x will boost performance by sometimes 10%. That's like a performace increase of, uh, like 10% or something, eh? And here's dweak straight from the guys at GXS:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\Display\0000\schemes99]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\Display\0000\schemes99\3DMARK2000\settings]

"TMC"=dword:00000000 "ACZ"=dword:00000000 "AMP"=dword:00000001 "TSL"=dword:00000000
- And -

[HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Display\Settings] "VPESupport"="OFF"

This will enable single-texturing fill-rate which may corrupt some graphics... (just some? Yeah right... oh, oops, I forgot to add that eh, eh?), but at least Quake3 will run quite a few fps faster... And now here's dweak that can help all 3d accelerator users and not just S3 owners... actually, this tip came from a nVidia website:

Find out the IRQ of your 3d card and then go to sysedit (or just open up your system.ini file any way you like). Then in the [win386] section, add Irq[n]=4096 (or 8192, depending on how big you want the buffer to be). n is the IRQ value of your video card... geez, this reminds me of certain modem tweak... Then reboot your computer to start the changes.

Other dweaks include that AGP1x is faster than AGP2x for resolutions below 1024x768 because AGP really is unnecessary and just wastes bandwith, & it turns out someone figured out what that DMACD setting is in the registry:

It's actually the old CommandDMA setting (which I don't remember either... yeah, I pretty much suck at regediting... but don't anyone...). It can have a value of 1P, 2P, 3P, 4P, 1A, 2A, 3A, or 4A. "P" means PCI memory while "A"means AGP memory. If you don't have this setting, don't worry because it's automatically set in newer drivers... wait, is that a good thing or not?... By the way, I think CommandDMA controlled the level of mipmapping & these settings can seriously affect your S3 card's stability.

Ok, the next dweak only applies to ViperII owners & only applies to older S2k drivers. This should enable preliminary Hardware transform & lighting:

HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Display\Settings] "ICDHWTL"="OFF"

TreeMark "Simple" benchmark: 5.64908 fps

[HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Display\Settings] "ICDHWTL"="ON"

But I can't recommend turning this on yet unless your driver release says you can... T&L works fine in benchmarking but in games... let's just say the S2k board will work as efficiently as a S3 programmer...

I've got a crummy CL Savage4 like you & my refresh won't get away from 56Hz. Help us, false guru!

I'm right on it! I had that stupid problem for months now.. but in just a short jig and a few reboots, you can get your CL Savage running at that oh-so blurry 100Hz! I think the problem was not the card inself but Win95. Even BiPolar's old drivers wouldn't fix that 56Hz refresh problem for me (my CL didn't start up in anything else but 56Hz). But when my eyes lit up to see a BiPolar Win95 build, I immediately installed it (I'm not sure if I had even finished downloading it at that point...) & voila, my computer started with 100Hz!... but then I got that stupid hourglass that wouldn't change so I rebooted in safe mode & reinstalled my CL drivers 1.04 (without uninstalling BiPolar's... sneaky, eh?). When my computer booted up, I was shocked to see that my refresh rate was still 100Hz! Something in that BiPolar build did it for me, so if you've gotta worship a guru, worship him. And trust me, 100Hz looks SOOOO much better than 56Hz or even 72Hz (my old standard). Sure, text is all blurry but when you're running games, even though the fps is SOOOOOO slow on my Pentium166, the 100Hz does drastically cut down on the choppiness to the human eye. If this method doesn't work for you, go to your DXDIAG troubleshooting tab and overwrite your Hz with 85Hz or something. As long as your computer boots, it'll be all right... Geez, I can hear those tech support phones ringing in my house already... but I really do suck at the computer... not literally, of course... huh? What the hell does that mean? I already forgot...

My stupid Video Card is hogging all of my system resources! ARGGHHH! Won't it just die or something?

Yes, Charlie, it will. Yes it will... But most of us would rather just fix this problem then watch our computer blow up (well, a selected few of us do...). A big problem lies in bus hogging, a concept made public by, - who else? - GXS. If the 3d accelerator is busy with doing it's own stuff (in private, of course...), it hogs all of the PCI bandwith. So when your little Savage4 or Geforce or whatever the heck you've got is calculating vectors and vertices, all of your other perierals... uh, I mean, perhiperals... uh, I mean, perhipabals... oh, nevermind.... Ok, all your other PCI cards with be sitting idle. Simple enough? Goody two shoes. To fix this, go into your system.ini and under the [display] section, add: busthrottle=1. Then, if you've got a S3 Savage, go to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Config\0001\Display Settings] and set the Busthrottle setting to "ON". That should solve your dilemma until you snap and decide to use your computer as a bowling ball, which is fine as long as you play with those rubber bumper thingys on the walls... uh, yeah... aren't I just the greatest with words?...

I've got a ViperII and me want to use the best driver for it. Which one should me use, or should me buy nVidia out?

Please don't swindle my dream from me. Taking down Microsoft, nVidia, and those aliens from Independence Day has always been my heart and long-lost soul thingy. Anyways, the following data is taken from Rizenet so yes, you can call me a copy & paster cat. Rizen used a Celeron 550 with cache latency of 1 on a Microstar BX 6163 Pro Revision 2 Mainboard. He tinkered around with his ViperII Z200 and set the core clock to 150 MHz and the mem clock to 175. Rizen magically discovered that drivers 9.00.23 and 9.10.24 had higher fill-rates and less CPU usage than more recent drivers. However, the 9.00.23 did have quite a bit of tearing and artifacts in games, and there's no word on how stable it is. So the first driver that Rizen recommends is the 9.10.24 because it can enables the Z200's 4 textures in one pass ability and has pretty reliable stability. Rizen then updated his little driver gang-alley shootout by comparing the 9.10.24 with newer revisions. He ran these tests in 3dmark2000 at 640x480x16 bit colour, which is basically the limit of the little S3 family. Rizen discovered that not only do the 9.50.05 drivers have the same 3d speed as the 9.10.24 ones, but it greatly enhances game compatibility, tweaks some stability, and it definintely dweaks the 2d performance. In Rizen's own words put into mine, he definetely noticed the 2d speed difference in the Windows9x GUI. Sounds like fun, doesn't it, co-operative? The final conclusion: I never liked 3dmark2000. I am a BiPolardist and truly believe that a driver cannot be tested outside of real-world games like Quake3, Half-Life (although I really hate this game with a passion), or Unreal Tournament (which just won't doggone work in Metal mode for me). Still, Rizen is still the smartest S3 guy that I know so if you trust him, you might as well trust him.

My stupid Savage4 doesn't take kindly to S3 Reference Drivers, so what the hell can my card chew?

I already mentioned above (me thinks) that you can update their driver set by copying a bunch of S3 files from the unzipped reference driver sets to your always bugging out Windows\System directory (but alas, me forget what files you must copy, so try them all when you're feeling Burger King bold). Both Rizen and BiPolar's driver sets seem to have PCI Savage4 support so you can try those if you want to avoid chewing your leg off in frustration, but I've heard the best solution for CL owners is to use some version of Fachman's drivers. I'm not sure which ones have it, but Fachman drivers should have real CL support in them and even have Creative Lab's famed Glide support (which they were sued for after they got punched out by the departing 3dfx), although for all I know he just uses a Glide emulator of some kinda North Pole sort. If you want to find those drivers, I suggest visiting GXS 'cause they seem to have everything filed like a barbeque at: http://gxs.cjb.net

I own a copy of Dreamweaver but it doesn't work & I'm too lazy to visit GXS, so what can I do?

Geez, that sure makes me feel blarney special... Oh well, AOL, GXS has impotently discovered that the Savage4 8.10.14 drivers released by, of all things vile in this world, Microsoft, have the ability of boring Macromedia's Dreamweaver into working. I have no idea where to get these drivers, but considering they stem from the root of all software evil, it's probably found on the Win98 CD or something. The reason this driver set works for Dreamweaver is because it supports LinearMipNearest (God, is that still around? They should lock that in a col, barren room with Ringo Starr or something...) while newer ones sorta scrap that granddaddy-long legs formula.

I hated Alice in that Wonderland book. I hated how she Advertised Anti-Aliasing when it's nowhere in the Savage4!

I know! Makes use feel all abused and Dragonhearted inside or something. Just to clear something up for everyone: I am an idiot & I'm probably going to get this wrong. Um, wait, that didn't come out right. Well, a lot of people still believe that there is anti-aliasing in the Savage4 but, um, here comes the shock: an video card producing company actually lied! Omigosh! Is the world gonna end now? Well, there is no anti-aliasing but if you run at 640x480 or less, you can use Oversampling to sorta simulate the effect. Oversampling is Edge-Aliasing and can clean up those acupuncturing edges me bets, but it slows your graphics by such a large margin that you might as well play at 1024x768 then. And besides, Edge anti-aliasing sucks; AA makes games look incredicrockable, while EA stole the TWINE license right under RARE's belt... And just so you won't beat me on the head anymore, gosh darnit, who could believe that S3 lied again? The Savage4 does not have Environmental Bump Mapping; actually, they didn't lie becase I don't recall them claiming to have it. They said they had bump mapping, and indeed they do - just not a type that's actually usable in a game. It's more like that kind of bump mapping that sticks to the roof of your mouth and starts growing white film all over it before you can chew it out.

Ok, I'm bored and sick of my Savage. What's the best way to burn it to hell? I want the bragging rights!

Don't we all? Most people would recommend strapping it to a talking Pikachu doll and watch it commit suicide, but GXS has found a better way to screw your S4 board in every way (um, we are talking about the vcard, right?...). They've found exactly where in the bios the speed of your Savage4 is located, and whoever can pull this crap off without frying their board or piss in their pants is a true work of art. You have to enter your S3 bios' debug mode. I think you have to search in the bios for your exact S3 card; if you have a reference board, look for a dc000:c0, if you have a Stealth III, looky for a dc000:d0, and if you're one of the lucky ones to watch a Stealth Xtreme burn in flames, look for a dc000:e0. Now, you should then find a line that starts with a 00 0B. For instance, GXS reports that their Stealth III has the line 00 0B 76 41 76 41 67 41, which can be easily understood if you rearraged it into 000B 7641 7641 6741... okay, maybe not... let me just find my Whakatakka translation book here... Well, it looks like GXS has done all the decoding (hint: this is GXS's work, so if you fry your board prematurely and don't have enough fun, blame them - hint hint) and it appears that the 7641s are the SDRAM and SGRAM mem clocks, and the 6721 is the Core clock. Um, excuse me for having an IQ less than -70, but how the heck did you figure this out, GXS? Well, they thought about it for a second, then gave us all this little formula: first add M & 2, then multiply that by 14.31818, then divide the whole thing by (N+2)*2^R, where M=64, N-4, and R=1 and all values have to be decimal base 10 math and not hexadecimal... um, this deserves a... right.... And before all this, I actually thought I could understand math... Alrighty then, I think I'll sway away from this dweak; besides, it's probably just as fun to overclock your S3 core to 250MHz or something and watch smoke, uh, smoke out of your tower case while benchmarking demoes play nonstop on your computer for 66 hours or something. But then there's nothing to brag about that. Oh well, AOL, I guess it's time to buy a Pikachu doll and an Assault Rifle...

I'm looking through the Registry right now, but I can't read German so I don't understand a thing. What's going on?

Before I start with this life-draining topic, I'm just letting you know that I've never tried modifying these reg settings so me have a donkey's clue what they do. I took this list from Rizen a few months ago, so it may be a little outdated. That's okay, because the fun thing about reg entries is that not even Microsoft understands their little entry system anymore. The fun lies in the fact that we have the same knowledge of these unknowns as an orangutan has about the evil of the blue clown possee or something. So keep screwing up those computers like I do, and in no time you'll be backuping up your registry in fear everyday for the rest of your little lives... Welcome to the world of Mycrowsoft.

Okay dokay, here are the reg entries for the S4 in the HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Display\Settings registry key. I think these are the settings that are easily altered by entering an ON or OFF in the modify reg key area thingy.

AA - enables Auto AGP - I keep it on VO (S3 Onboard Mem. only) because AGP was always just a setup by Intel to trick gullible gamers into buying motherboards with so-called faster transfer rates and more VRAM, but it only really works well if you're stuck with one of those ugly 4MB Video Cards (I always disable AGP on my 8MB G200 & all games now seem to have less artifacts too)

AC - ON to enable Auto Tex. Compression - as a 32MB S4 owner, I don't really think I need to compress Quake3's textures because doing so will slow down the start of the game considerable; however, later on in the game if all textures are compressed, the S4 will happily run faster because all graphics are now in S3TC format

AGPSB - ON to enable AGP Sidebanding - turning this on will increase speed, but most gamers keep this off because it causes most of their Direct3d games to crash (including Unreal Tournament a lot of the time)

AM - ON for auto-mipmapping - Always keep this on because mipmapping today always makes 3d cards run faster with much improved Shirley Temple graphics

AP - ON for auto-palette - turning this on will make every texture 8-bit colour and thus should make games run faster, but glitches may occur on screen like a little leprechaun jumping up and down at the end of a monitor rainbow

AT - ON to enable Trilinear Filtering - at this time of the 3d ballpark hot dog game, the S4 is still the only card that does true trilinear with no decrease in speed; I recommend keeping this on because not only will all your games look much cleaner, but it's the only real reason left to keep your S4 (next to that DVD playback, but I'm still using 8-track tapes for video recording... huh?)

ATB - ON to enable Auto triple Buffering - If you disable Vsync in games (and whodunnit?), then you should turn on Triple Buffering to buffer extra data to reduce tearing and other spatial anomalies

EF - ON to force DirectX fog - I hate conforming to Microsoft, but most games use Direct3d so you should keep this option on if you want your DX7 games to look at close to being right as the S4 can get

ES - ON to use Eye Fog - okay, I don't like 3dfx much but at least they're not AOL... huh? Nevermind. If you havea game that doesn't look right with DX fog, use Eye fog to render fog the same way Glide does

FB - enables Page flipping instead of Blitting - I know that every card can now do blitting without a performing decrease, but if you want indecent proposal graphics but faster speeds at about 1024x768 or higher, you might as well use Page Flipping for dolphin fun

FD - ON enables Fastdraw - keeping this on should allow polygons to be drawn with machine-like efficiency (not like it can drawn any other way) faster than before, but it may cause some spiteful, laid-off Polygons to attack you with their ugliness

OS - ON enables Oversampling - turning this on will enable Full-Screne Anti-Aliasing which smooths all those ugly little lines, and after extensive IvanF testing, Quake3 runs just fine at 512x384 with OS on... but I don't tthinky we'd want that, now would we?

OT - ON enables auto-switching between AC mode and AP - this screws my games up every time I use it, so I recommend you use it too. It's a hell of a lot more fun than Id Software games...

TP - ON uses Texture Patches - I've never heard of this cry-baby before because it fixes texture alignment in DX6.1, but since we're all stealing those DX8 betas right now, I don't think we need this on

TSL - ON uses Top Scan Line - turning this on will get rid of those ugly blue or green lines stuck at the top of your screen when you're not looking, but it comes with a performance decrease

VO - uses Video Memory Only - Why can't we just disable that damn AGP and all get along? Sure, AGP2x has that 584MB/sec transfer rate or something, but even Q3 and UT don't exceed that 133MB/sec limit that PCI 2.1 is joy-joyfully stuck with, so let's just hold hands and pray for reunification, shall we? Bless us all, everyone.

VT - a S2k's form of VO - Intel is trying to trick you! VT is Video Texturing only! They're trying to deceive your eyes by not putting that VO there, and I say we should take a bolt of lightning and strike down those oppressors! Who's with me? Who's with me? Bloody hell, may the plagues have mercy on their souls !.. yeah, I know. I don't get out much...

WC - ON enables Write Combining - I think this is always on for S4s, but if it ain't enable, it for faster speed; I;m not sure what Write Combining really is, but turning it on is supposed to make tiny little graphic glitches that I think the S4 hides like little children in the farmhouse

WV - ON enables VSync - Blasphemer! Pray for forgiveness if you use Vsync! No gamer in their right mind will play with v-sync on or else lose those 20 or so fps that no-one can notice anyways! So that's why I keep this option on! I can't get past 25 fps in Quake3 anyhew so syncing with the monitor makes no difference, and if I don't keep this on, my mouse lags like a 150 year old grandmother and I see sticks and hockey pucks poking out of player's heads when the game hasn't even started yet!

ZB - ON enables that 32-bit Z-buffer that doesn't work - the 32-bit Z-buffer really takes up a lot of speed but makes all the graphics seem a tad bit better to me; turning this ON enables the 8-bit legendary Stencil Buffer too for better shadows and stuff but I can't even tell when it's on or off, so leave it off for faster gameplay

ZC - ON enables Fast Z-Buffer Clearing - okay, we all know that this setting makes kicks data out of the Z-buffer and into the Microsoft Recycling Bin faster than you could walk to Yamil, Saskatchewan; I keep this setting because I don't really notice how bad my screen falls apart when I'm trying to frag that textureless freak who's shooting me with that invisible weapon of his

Texture by App - if you're a die hard AGP fan, you might as well keep this best of both worlds one on instead of AA; it will force the S4 to only use the System RAM if all of your Video RAM is used up... So turn on AutoS3TC and then I'll happily let you use this with your 32MB card...

Okay dokay, now the following set of reg keys are found in HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Display\Settings values . Me have really no clue what they do since wacking my behind usually prevents me from checking the registry myself (huh?). Anyhew, here's the list so follow it if you can:

32BppCRTonly - probably forces Cathode Ray Tube monitors (like my Sony Trinitron that just doesn't seem to work at bloody all) to use 32 bit per pixel colour only (like I care - every game freezes at 16-bit colour for bloody me...)

ATP - huh? Well, just leave it ON in case those Gargoyles decide to come out and play...

AVCT - ummm... maybe I'll go back to playing my N64 again where there is no Microsoft... yet...

Bitblt - has something to do with blitting, but me don't know what ON and OFF will do

BM - most likely stands for Bus Mastering, if the S4 reg works anything like my G200 (which outruns GeForces if you go by Solar Car Races...) so it's probably much better to leave this ON

BusThrottle - if this is OFF, your S4 will happily hog all of your PCI bandwith and just like a salamadar on Christmas day, it won't share it with any of your other PCI cards; this improves your 3d sound, but may screw up your SB Live or whatever PCI Sound Card you have, but this tis no problem for 286 me because me still use a ISA SBAwe64... Gotta love that Industrial Architecturial Whatever Standard...

COB - this is the Command DMA button, and it's usually better to leave the Command DMA buffer on to run (to directly access your RAM), but sometimes turning this off can kommand and kill (harw harw...) that annoying mouse lag in menu screens

CRTResolution - ummm, beats the $%#& out of me...

DDSW - I've heard that this is the Direct Draw Software Mode, so turning this ON will slow down programs but at least they will run without crashing every 5.2434456 seconds...

DefaulttoSim & DeviceBitMap - Uh, I'm starting to feel like a dandelion now. Don't ask me why.

DuoView - Me heard this could be something with Win98 dual monitor support, but I'm starting to think this is for those S4 cards that can run the video graphics for 2 computers at once, but what do I know? I'm not Vince.

Ellipse & EnableHighRes16 - Not sure at all how Ellipse screws up the S4 even more, if that is inhumanly possible, but the Enabling High Res in 16-bit mode or something could prove entertaining when I'm through sniffing at my slippers...

FF & FRTC - I don't think the S4 people would curse at us, so I've lost all track of what I was saying...

GBClip & HighColor - Gameboy? I don't think so. The Clipping thing might have something to do with a crappy Z-buffer, but since I don't know, I'm just going to blame Microsoft like most people do these days. As for HighColour, I have no Ron Maclean idea why HighColour would be set anywhere else than the Win9x display properties, but that's what I always say while I'm typing with a baseball glove on.

ICD - probably enables that Performance OpenGL ICD to run in Quake3, but I never liked actually seeing the game with decent graphics so I use the miniGL.

IDCTOS & IgnoreRegistry - Um, I'm sorry; I'm getting all clammed up now 'cause I just get excited everytime I see those two words: "TOS". Yeah... As for the IgnoreRegistry feature, I wish you can program that into the Windows Kerrnel itself, but when it comes to the S4, it probably means return to factory defaults or something else even more screwy.

Interleave - if I were you and I probably am, I would leave this option off; Leave it off, even if you have to glue your fingers to your arse to do it because interleaving would put those horrid scanlines throughout your screen; however, if you don't care about having graphics that the human eye can see, turn interleaving on to improve your fps

InvertBobPolarity - I figured this one out from SDN; it turns out that BOB is not some Microsoft freak with a lot of time on his hands, but is a DVD decoding feature and turning this ON will improve the S4's DVD playback ability

InvertWeavePolarity - same as above; turn this on to watch Cher live on a 192 min DVD with better squeeting (not a typo...)

LinearAddressBase - has something to do with memory addresses, but I'm not sure where in Nevad Area51 really is, so let's leave that to the pros

All the MCS3 reg entries - they all have to do with S3 software decoding so for know, leave nature the way it was planned or else all S3 hell may break loose

NC, ND, & that infamous NF - I hate these guys. They try to seem so smart with short names, but I prefer variable names like amoeba, gnof, and gnavity. Just ask any of my programming friends 'cause I'm not joking. I almost got kicked out of class for using the Menendez or something like that brothers in my Mid-term Grade 11 project.

NK, Nofile, & NonDCC - I wish I had X-ray vision like Superman. Then I'd be just as clueless as I am now at what these reg keys mean.

Output - probably has to do with switching between LCD and CRT screens or maybe TV output because most people - get ready for the punchline... like money! Get it? Like money! HA! HA!... um....

Palletized - smells like it has something to do with those Palletized textures that were mentioned high above, but I'll stick to the walls of WCW Jericho, thank you very much

Polygon & Polyline - whatever these two winged things are, they don't look natural... I mean, what the hell is a Polygon?!!!... seriously... no, I'm not joking... hello? Is anyone there?... I'm cold, and there's wolves after me...

PS & QF - add a "I" inbetween that P & S and sawder a "SED" at the end to get how I feel whenever Playstation is mentioned... I've been playing Resident Evil 2 on the N64 (w/ the 4MB Expansion) & I just don't see what is good about these so-called "mature" games. To me, they're as loony and boring as anime pornography (okay, scratch out boring... huh? Uh, nevermind...)

Rectangle, RR, SageMode - No clue, and I'm getting to tired to seem even more stupid than I am. If Meg is reading this, she probably knows what I'm talking about (um, I should shut up now...)

Scanline - a scanline is a row of pixels, & I still remember how devastating I was when I lost that Grade 2 Limbo contest; it wasn't fair, I tell ya! I was so much taller than those damn kindergarden kids who were laying the smackdown on me...

Shadow & SingleDisplay - does Shadow turn off shadows? Probably not, because games and software is supposed to control that. The singledisplay probably relates back to that Win98 dual monitor thingy that hangs at the back of your mouth, but I'm not sure so I'll leave it for Mr. Roger's possee to take out

SWCursor - this disables mouse cursors being run by S4 hardware; turning Software cursors on might help that mouse lag in menu screens like I get stuck with in Star Trek Armada

TC, Texout, TFM, & TM - you'd like to know what I'm thinking about right now, right? Well, so do I. I'll give you a hint: it only has something to do with palm trees, can-can dancers, and that sucrose found in space...

Truecolor - I'm guessing that the display settings turn on and off HighColor and Truecolor, because why the heck would S4 take up more memory space and an extra 2 CPU functions to just slow the computer down even more, corrupt the registry, and for no viable goddam reasonable reason?... unless they're following the Microsoft doctrine, and then it's all becoming clear now...

VB, VC, VD & WE - I'm as dumbfounded as a baby being coughed out of the womb, and I'm not even talking about these reg settings

WF - wait for flip is some sort of S3 Metal setting turning it ON might improve performance... Wait! Can this be true? I actually know what one of these reg settings does? Omegosh! Omegosh! That brings my IQ to at least 35! Sweet home Alabama, here I come (ouch, shouldn't have said that... um, I guess I'm not really being smart by not deleting what I wrote, but oh well, AOL, I'm too lazy to stop typing and press backspace again and again and again...)

YUVColorAdjust - hooked on Reference Drivers don't work for me, so I don't get to play with this setting; it alters your gamma colour settings so you can make the screen look as crisp and blue as a newborn donkey or a McDonald's cheeseburger (I know, I know, I'm just comparing two of the same thing...)

And thank God, I'm almost at the end. If you visit HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Display\Settings\FOURCCS3TC and you actually have cut down your Attention Deficit Disorder enough to look, you'll find these two settings:

S3TCS3S4 - this has something to do with S3TC compression (damn nVidia bought S3 out and took my baby! They took my baby!) and the S3 refers to Savage3d and the S4 refers to the S4 species, either the domestic type or the ones still in the wild

And yes, me know me mentioned there was a second reg setting here but cut me some khacki (God, I hate those Gap commercials...) slack 'cause I have bloody thick glasses! I'm seeing double, a-ok? So what are you gonna do? Make me spill hot coffee on your lap and sue me?... hey, um, don't get any ideas, alright?... hello?... allo?... que sera, sera...

I just downloaded S3Tweak & I have no clue how to use it. How can I make my Savage4 faster with it?

Oh boy, shall we start again?... Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer...