I think we ought to change the name of this thread to Frantint & Win2000! I installed my Visontek nVidia TNT2 32Meg Video Card, and ran Fractint a few times in a dos box, it worked fine with some of the Fractint low-res Vesa vanilla ibm settings, I knew that some of the Vesa registers were being accessed by Fractint. Then I ran makefcfg a few times. Here's the interesting point! Half the time makefcfg reported an error message that it couldn't see any vesa registers etc.... BUT the other half of the time it found them. So the problem getting the proper vesa register addresses is an intermittent one! Maybe the problem has something to do with the way makefcfg.exe runs in Win2000. I then hacked and tweaked and edited the fractint.cfg and fractcfg.cfg files to also include some dos video save mode parameters. Fractint runs fast and snappy in Win2000 and even complicated files run fast. The dos save mode is still a little slow side. I made a Dos box the same way I did in Win98. From explorer highlight and right click fractint.exe, then select thwe "make shortcut" option. Right click the shortcut and go into properties and modify memory, screen, program, & window settings to suit, just like in Win95/98. I like to hea some opinions on the most optimal memory management for a Fractint Dos Box in Win2000? All the best, TG ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ken MacLean" <kmaclean@ic.net> To: <fractint@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Monday, January 07, 2002 4:49 PM Subject: Re: [Fractint] fractint and xp
"Damien M. Jones" wrote:
Unfortunately for FractInt, VESA support in the BIOS faded into disuse when DirectX became more popular. Game developers--the last major group of programmers still wanting direct access to hardware--could move to Windows and theoretically simplify their development efforts. It isn't so much that FractInt doesn't support AGP and PCI cards; it's more than those newer cards no longer provide the VESA interface that FractInt needs to talk to them. Many cards provided only basic VESA support but even that is disappearing from new video cards.
Right! Your explanation is more accurate. BTW, I tried formatting a FAT16 partition under Win2000 (which can be done without Partition Magic, just go to control panel -administrative tools-computer management-disk management) and running fractint, but of course it didn't work any better, for the reasons you have just explained. I got 564 x 400 video mode (IBM Register Comnpatible) by tweaking up my monitor to 100 HZ, but then the flicker was so bad it hurt my eyes. Oh well, at least I found out how to partition my hard disks under Win2000. -- Ken
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