The Universal VESA TSR ---------------------- Version 3 3 ---------------------- Copyright (C) 1993 Kendall Bennett All rights reserved What is it ----------- The Universal VESA TSR is a small Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program that provides extends the Video BIOS routines of SuperVGA video cards to make them compatible with the Video Electonics Standards Association (VESA) recommended extensions By having a video card that has a VESA compatible BIOS or by installing this small TSR programs that support the VESA programming interface will work correctly for your SuperVGA This helps to solve a lot of problems with compatibility between different SuperVGA cards on the market Why use it ----------- You may already have a VESA TSR for you video card or you video card may have a VESA compatible BIOS already so why would you want to use this program The simple answer is that most of the TSR s that exist today and a lot of the not-so-new SuperVGA cards that are around implement an older version of the VESA programming interface (if any at all) For this reason some programs that use the advanced features of the new VESA standard will not work with the TSR or BIOS that you currently have So what advanced features does this TSR provide that other s don t The Universal VESA TSR implements the VESA Version 1 2 programming interface which supports the following features - VESA page flipping High performance animation programs can use your card to full potential using the VESA BIOS to implement extended page flipping (imagine 1024x768x16 double buffered animation or even 800x600x256 and 640x400x32k 64k on a 1Mb video card!!) - Support for the 32k 64k and 16 million color video modes As well as supporting the industry standard 16 and 256 color video modes - Speed The bank switching code in this package tends to run faster than the routines embedded in the VIDEO BIOS of some video cards Hardware Requirements --------------------- The Universal VESA TSR contains 386 dependant code so it will only run on machine that have and 80386 or better CPU Currently the Universal VESA TSR supports the following SuperVGA chipsets (note that not all of these have been fully tested) - ATI Technologies 18800 28800 - Ahead A & B - Chips & Technologies 82c451 452 453 - Everex - Genoa Systems GVGA - OAK Technologies OTI-037C OTI-067 OTI-077 - Paradise PVGA1A WD90C00 10 11 30 31 - NCR 77C20 21 22E - Trident 88 8900 - Video7 V7VGA versions 1-5 - Tseng Labs ET3000 ET4000 - AcuMos AVGA2 - S3 86c911 924 801 805 928 - Advance Logic AL2101 SuperVGA - MXIC 86010 SuperVGA - Primus 2000 SuperVGA - RealTek 3106 SuperVGA - Cirrus CL-GD 5422 SuperVGA The Universal VESA TSR seems to have problems with QEMM since QEMM does something weird with the Video BIOS In order to fix this problem you should use the QEMM exclude options to exclude the Video BIOS area Do this by including the following in the QEMM options EXCLUDE=C000-C1FF How do I install it -------------------- You can install the TSR from the command line or from your autoexec bat file Don t worry about installing it twice it will automatically detect if you have already installed it To install it simply type univesa from the command line It will determine what type of SuperVGA card you have installed and install itself accordingly You may also use command line options to modify the the automatic video card detection logic The following is produced by type univesa -h at the command line Options are -v - Check for VESA BIOS first -s name - Force detection of SuperVGA name -c x - Force detection of SuperVGA chipset (numerical id) -m size - Force memory size to size -d x - Force DAC type (0 VGA 1 15 bit 1 16 bit 3 24 bit) -i - Do not perform SuperVGA detection It is possible the SuperVGA detection code will hang the machine on old VGA SVGA cards You can optionally force the program to work with any combination of card chipset memory size and DAC but unless you specify the -i option unspecified values will be filled in automatically for you Thus you if the detection code did not correctly identify you video card configuration you can force the TSR to work with the correct values When installed the Universal VESA TSR takes up approximately 9k of memory All of the code required to detect the video adapter and available video modes is removed after the program is installed saving on the amount of memory required You may also load the TSR high Can I get the source code -------------------------- Yes the full source code for this library is available along with a number of test programs (with source) for programming SuperVGA cards in a device independant manner in a SuperVGA Test Kit Library You can probably download this from Simtel20 or garbo (or one of it s mirrors) or you can ftp the absolute latest version from godzilla cgl rmit oz au kjb MGL svgakt zip How can I contact the Author ----------------------------- If you have any corrections or updates to the code in this package or you have any questions you would like asked feel free to contact me through one of the following methods Internet kjb@citri edu au Snail Mail Home Kendall Bennett 15 Stevenson Street Kew Victoria 3101 AUSTRALIA Work Kendall Bennett RMIT Advanced Computer Graphics Centre CITRI Building 723 Swanston Street Carlton Victoria 3053 AUSTRALIA