Hardware Detection workaround?

Hello. I am after something I can do to get my viewer to bypass hardware detection upon startup.

I am running windows 7 64bit I have a ATI Radeon1650.

I know that ati have not released drivers for my card and will not be any time soon, if ever. I understand that the drivers I have are not the latest, as there aren't any latest drivers, as I am forced to use the windows vista 64bit drivers.

Second life, the release candidate and even greenlife will not run as I get the same error about drivers not being up to date.

I have tried all kinds of compatibility combinations.

What I am after is a workaround for second life release candidate that bypasses the hardware detection stage of startup so I can run SL again. I am sure there is one but I cannot find it. I vaguely remember having to type something in the target line in properties when you right clock on the program icon.

Can anyone help me?

Right click on the shortcut you use to open second life. Go to Properties, in the field "target" put a space at the very end then "--noprobe".

The fact that you are using your OS's built in drivers may mean SL will not run at all. If you follow the steps above, SL may just crash silently.

Dante, I went to the AMD ATI website and doenloaded the drivers from there, I am not using the windoes7 provided drivers.

EDIT: I added that to the end and still get the eror

Looks like it may be time to Ebay that card.

You can also buy something older yet still powerful for $50-60 usd like a nVidia 9400/9500GT with 512mb ram.

ATI is so hit and miss with SL...it is pretty sad.

Yeah, It's such a shame too. I have always liked ATI cards. I am going to see if it will run in my XP virtual machine. Might be slower but at least I can use SL until I get my hands on a different card.

You would have better luck installing Ubuntu 8.10 or 9.04. SL runs really fast in that.

I'd be running it now but it won't install for some reason on my machine since i put windows 7-64 on it. But it was the primary boot OS before i upgraded my CPU/RAM and to Windows 7.

Even if you can get it to work, I think you'll be better off with a newer card.

Have you tried over versions of the driver? I was fiddling around with an older ATI card (9600XT) and even though the Catylist 9 Vista drivers claimed to support it, I had to go back to the last 8 driver to get it to work in Windows 7 (32-bit).