New video board for Fractint
Success!! Got a reasonably inexpensive new video board with good VESA VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE) support. My considerations were: 1. Good VBE so Fractint would work. 2. I'm not a gamer, don't need latest and fastest 3D support, but did want some decent 3D support. You never know what software I might want to run. 3. Work well with Windows XP and Linux with reasonably current drivers. 4. DVI connector and TV out just in case I want to use them (maybe get an LCD monitor). Use the AGP slot 5. Reasonably cheap ($60 or so) What precipitated this was that my ATI Radeon 7500 hangs up in SVGA modes with Fractint, and even if it didn't, doesn't have great Fractint/VBE support. 1600x1200x256 is more or less the "fractint holy grail" for video modes, and the ATI quites well before that (if it worked, of course, which it doesn't). To be fair, others have told me that their ATI boards work OK with fractint, but they have complained of limited number of available modes. Since ATI, the performance leader these days in video boards, doesn't seem to have very good VESA VBE support, I opted for an Nvidia Geforce board. Nvidia doesn't seem to make their own boards, but there are many brands that use their chips. I picked Chaintech in Taiwan because I could find reasonable information on their web site. I bought the board from www.axiontech.com because they are local to Houston and I could drive over and pick up the board. The exact board I got was a Chaintech FX20, a 128MB Geforce FX5200 board. This Nvidia Geforce 5200 chipset is has been out about a year, and is the current Nvidia low end, which is what I wanted. VESAINFO reports (edited for only the 256 color modes): Allegro VESAINFO utility 3.0 By Shawn Hargreaves, 1997 VESASignature: VESA VESAVersion: 3.0 OEMStringPtr: NVIDIA TotalMemory: 2048 (131072K) Mode 0x130: 320x200 8 bpp packed pixel Mode 0x131: 320x400 8 bpp packed pixel Mode 0x134: 320x240 8 bpp packed pixel Mode 0x100: 640x400 8 bpp packed pixel Mode 0x101: 640x480 8 bpp packed pixel Mode 0x103: 800x600 8 bpp packed pixel Mode 0x105: 1024x768 8 bpp packed pixel Mode 0x107: 1280x1024 8 bpp packed pixel Mode 0x147: 1400x1050 8 bpp packed pixel Mode 0x145: 1600x1200 8 bpp packed pixel I downloaded and installed the latest Nvidia drivers for XP (not needed for Fractint) and installed the board without a hitch. However makefcfg crashes under XP (I'm not sure why, makefcfg is based on vesainfo.) So I booted to DOS but needed a DPMI server to run the program. There's a free one at: http://clio.rice.edu/cwsdpmi/csdpmi5b.zip In any case, you don't really need makefcfg. Just take the standard fractint.cfg, copy and pace one the "VESA Standard Interface" modes, edit the resolution, and put the mode number from vesainfo (without the leading 0x) into the BX register column. I'll look into making up a freedos boot disk with a DPMI server and makefcfg on it. We could publish an image of it at fractint.org. When all this was done, I was happily running fractint at 1600x1200. Note that I've been able to do this for a long time on my old computer (circa 1998) with a Nvidia Riva TNT based board. I'm just happy current boards still have legacy VESA support. One final footnote. The board I bought actually has a VESA 2048x1536 mode, but only 32 bit true color (sigh!). Tim
I wrote:
However makefcfg crashes under XP (I'm not sure why, makefcfg is based on vesainfo.)
Turns out the makefcfg.exe is OK under XP. The one that crashed was a fancier but apparently unfinished version time stamped a few months later in 1999. Hmmm - I don't see makefcfg at Fractint.org - I could have sworn we distributed it. If anyone doesn't know what I am babbling on about, it's a handy program that outputs the VESA information from your video board formatted as a valid fractint.cfg file. Tim
Tim Wegner wrote:
Hmmm - I don't see makefcfg at Fractint.org - I could have sworn we distributed it.
Tim, it's part of the Fractint DOS distro (FRAIN200.ZIP). Another graphics board info, for people (still) using a Matrox G400 or G450: Since the max. 256-color VESA resolution for these is 1280x1024 (1600x1200 was taken out to make room for hi- and truecolor support up to 1280x1024), there's a (sadly abandoned) freeware TSR that adds VESA modes the card's BIOS doesn't have. Although the implemented modes are mostly low-res, the latest betas (3 and 4) include a "mode-builder", which should be able to get 1600x1200 back. Name of the latest beta: GX00B4.zip (AFAIK this was more or less the release candidate for the never materialized version 1.0 and is stable.) URL: http://www.rift.dk/index.php?view=area&areamode=files&project=Gx00VBE Inofficial mirror for beta3 and 4: http://mbnet.fi/bab5/gx00/ Ah, yes, the above works with G200 cards, too. Don't remember if this has been mentioned here already: Scitech has released older display management software for free. These are: UniVBE 6.7 (DOS) Display Doctor 6.53-d (DOS) Display Doctor 6.53 (DOS and Win9x) Display Doctor 5.3a (DOS and Win9x) Display Doctor 5.3a-d (DOS) http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/ent/free_titles.html Regards, Gerald
participants (2)
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Gerald K. Dobiasovsky -
Tim Wegner