Hi, The chapter about DOS in computer history is about to be finished. Fractint arose from an era Microsoft decided to sell their 'interrupt handler' as (*D*isk) *O*perating *S*ystem. There was (nearly) no hardware abstraction. Fortunately things changed. Fractint should now incorporate a driver for Microsoft's hardware abstraction 'DirectX'. This should obsolete all the built-in drivers (presently the VESA-driver is the only important driver. The other drivers belong to hardware that became 'hazardous waste' long ago). I like the text-mode user interface. The DirectX driver would imho involve many changes :-( Perhaps a port to cygwin/mingw with ncurses/pdcurses and libSDL would be at least painful (XFractint already uses ncurses) !? .... recently I found a driver called "VDMSound" (http://ntvdm.cjb.net/). It's a tool/DLL that emulates a complete Soundblaster-16/MPU401 ... just for playing old DOS games in Win2000/XP. And they are also planning a VESA-Emulation :-) .... My personal experiences with VESA & DOS-Box: The VESA-BIOS is there and works (gives correct adapter-ID an correctly lists all modes). As soon as I switch to modes >= 640x480x256 my monitor display turns off ;-( The monitor is not the problem: under pure DOS all these modes worked (640x480x256 even with 100 Hz). Tony Parker wrote:
Bill:
Had the same problem at first in Win2000.
If you ran makefcg.exe in a WinXP dos box you won't get the correct Vesa register addresses if there are any to be found. You have to boot your PC froom a Dos boot floppy disk and then run makefcfg.exe.
TG ----- Original Message ----- From: <BillatNY@aol.com> To: <fractint@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Monday, October 07, 2002 10:37 PM Subject: Re: [Fractint] Fractint on XP
Just to add another wrinkle to what Tony says, I was able to run makecfg and a fractint.cfg file was successfully created. But I still can't get the resolutions above 640 x 480 to work. So it's obviously no guarantee.
Bill -- Michael *Weitzel* ... all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy ...