OpenEuphoria

Re: Graphics

• Posted by Falkon <Falkn13 at IBM.NET> Mar 17, 1998
• 530 views

From:    "BABOR, JIRI" <J.Babor at GNS.CRI.NZ>
>Falkon, if you give me your email address, I'll send you my superrat,
>a set of superVGA mouse routines that seems to work. Jiri
From:    Lee woo seob <wslee at HHI.CO.KR>
>the same problem occurs in my computer, and in my friend's too.
>and we found that sigvesa.com(memory resident) attached below
>overcomes the trouble.

     Thanks to all who offered suggestions.  10 points to Lee woo seob for
having the right answer!  (though a different file)  After downloading the
VBE interrupt function reference and spending all day peeking and poking and
playing with video ROM and  converting hexadecimal words...  All that
low-level stuff that I really don't know anything about... I finally thought
to check the video chip manufacturer's webpage.
     Wouldn't ya know, there's a little TSR program called m64vbe.com that
translates the vesa instructions for the driver.  A program that's supposed
to be a standard part of the driver package, but which the PC makers so
thoughtfully didn't bother to include with the PC.
     So for anyone else with an ATI card based on the Mach64 chip who's
having problems, go to http://www.atitech.com and look around for the file.
For other cards, of course, it'd be different.  Then just load the TSR
before you run your program and unload it afterwords.  You could make a DOS
.BAT file like
;----------------------------
c:\ati\m64vbe.com vw vga s
cd c:\euphoria\source
ex myprog.ex
c:\ati\m64.com u
;----------------------------
to run your program, substituting the appropriate directories and program
names, of course.  I believe those are the correct switches for Euphoria's
(Watcom's) VESA implementation.  (memory aperture off, standard VGA crt,
single window)

    And if you don't have problems with your card, but do write SVGA
programs, you might want to make a note like that in your program's
documentation somewhere if you distribute it.  Perhaps under "Okay, I've got
a VESA driver loaded, why is it still not working?" in a readme file's
troubleshooting section.

Falkon, missing the days of DOS when all we needed was one driver file and
it came with the PC (and documentation.)