VillageTronic problems reported

VillageTronic Universal Installer 4.1 was released earlier this week. We have received several emails regarding it and/or the VillageTronic MP graphics cards. Here are the highlights:

Gray tone display glitch Frans vd Geest writes: "When displaying in thousands of colors, the VillageTronic MP 850 graphics card does not display greytones correctly from 6% downwards. Instead, it displays a light 'pink' color. Selecting millions of colors solves the problem but slows down the display." VillageTronic replied: "There is an overtone in the gray gamma correction that turns pink. Our chief software engineer is trying to overcome it. I´ll let you know as soon as it is cleared. The original problem is not ours, we are only trying to clear it."

A further reply stated (in part): "This problem occurs when using chipsets that were made to be used in PCs and not in Macintosh computers. We have no info yet when a fix will be included in one of our driver updates. For now there is no way around this."

Explorer, QuickTime and VT QT Accelerator Michael Erb writes: "I have been experiencing problems which I believe are caused by the interaction of the VillageTronic QuickTime accelerator software, QuickTime 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.5. After viewing a QuickTime movie in Internet Explorer, using the QuickTime plug-in, any subsequently viewed web pages are displayed with "blank" graphics. Graphics load, but are simply blank on the web page. This behavior does not exist in Netscape Communicator 4.5. The problem only seems to occur within Internet Explorer and only after viewing a QuickTime movie using the QuickTime Plug-in. When the VT QT Accelerator is not loaded during startup, the problem goes away."

Dave Burbank reports essentially the same problem as Michael, using an MP 750 card. However, he has an additional problem: "After installing 4.1, Explorer now crashes whenever it tries to display anything using the QuickTime plug-in. If I turn off the VT QuickTime Accelerator and restart, the problems do not occur. When I turn VT QuickTime Accelerator back on and restart, my MIE crashes return."