Software of the Month Club 1997 April

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Help me! or The Trouble with Universal VESA Drivers If you are reading this, you probably really feel you are in trouble. Funny things may well have happened to your display before, during, or even after, your attempt to run Coeli. This document will be most helpful if you print it out now and keep it by you as we try to work out what's wrong. The problems you are encountering almost certainly centre around your machine's inability to support the VESA standard and/or the extent of your VESA driver's capacity to detect and interact with your computer's graphics hardware. For the former, I'm afraid the only remedies are drastic - your machine is either too old for this version of Coeli, or you need a newer video card. But in all likelihood, your problem is the latter one: the VESA driver you have just tried to load - and which has failed to configure itself correctly - needs some help in recognising what sort of graphics setup your PC is equipped with. A less acute but similar manifestation of the problem may have occurred while you were using Coeli: the display may have appeared fragmented, jerked during screen updates, or text may have overwritten itself. If you are using the UniVBE universal VESA driver, your first job is to bypass your computer's own VESA BIOS routines with the -i switch ( see also UniVBE's documentation ). Type UNIVBE -i < with your other parameters (see below) > And please always remember to remove your old VESA driver from the system if you decide to install UniVBE in its place. This may necessitate erasing a line in autoexec.bat or config.sys and then re-booting, so if you are at all unsure, consult a good Dos guidebook (or someone in the know) first. You may not yet have obtained your copy of UniVBE from the sources listed at the end of this document, so before you read my attempts to get you up and running with the Universal driver, just check your PC's documentation and system floppies again for anything relating to 'VESA', 'Super VGA' or 'SVGA'. The people who manufactured the graphics board inside your computer may have included proprietary VESA drivers with your system. These will have been specifically tailored to your graphics setup and should be dug out and tested if at all possible. They may already be on your hard disk. If you find them, you'll probably discover that they work fine, at least in Coeli's mode 1 or 2. (Having found the proprietary driver and installed it, try typing COELI 2 at the Dos prompt from inside your Coeli directory. I've a feeling you'll be relieved at what you see). The filename of the driver will most likely simply be VESA.EXE. You may need to search quite hard for it, but in about 75% of cases VESA.EXE will be there somewhere. To test it, all you need do is type VESA at the Dos prompt, then if all's well, go to the Coeli directory and try typing COELI 2. If Coeli now runs OK in mode 2 (640x480 resolution), you're probably also all right for the default mode (800x600), the mode in which Coeli runs best. Now back to those problems with the *Universal driver. Because this clever piece of software has to cater for potentially scores of different graphics chipsets produced at various phases of the 386+ PC's short history (by manufacturers with different ideals about what makes the fastest display) it is bound to diagnose things incorrectly sometimes. In the swiftly changing world of the PC, no utility is ever infallible. But you can help it along, especially if you know (or suspect) a few simple facts about your system. For instance, if you know how much video RAM you have (512k, 1 Mb, 2Mb etc) you will be able to tell your VESA driver about this; If you know what bulk of graphics data your board can shift around in one go ( 8 bits, 16 bits, 24 bits, 32 bits etc), you will also be able to inform the *Universal Driver of this. In fact, if you can acquire just these two snippets of knowledge by consulting your documentation or perhaps merely looking on the box your PC came in, I can almost guarantee that you'll have Coeli - and any other graphics applications which might require VESA - up and running in no time. And if you don't know precisely, try experimenting. We'll now offer some suggestions as to what to type at the Dos command line with some typical configurations, using the excellent shareware VESA driver UniVBE from SciTech Software (see below for how to obtain this utility, if you don't have a copy already). Note: these instructions apply to versions 4.3 and 5.0 of UniVBE. If you have a different version, type UNIVBE -? to check that the command line switches are the same as those below. If you own a Pentium PC, please skip the next two paragraphs. As it's a good idea always to start by trying low to medium settings and working upwards rather than the other way round, and this is assuming you don't actually know your setup, first see what result you get by typing: UNIVBE -M512 -D3 The -M parameter stands for memory, or RAM, and 512 kilobytes was specified; -D stands for DAC (Digital to Analogue Converter) and we specified 24-bit operations. This is probably about right for 486 PC systems bought between 1992 and late 1993, but you could possibly have tried -M1024, meaning 1 Mb of video memory, but not until the lower figures first installed without hitches. If your machine is post 1994 - either a 486 DX or Pentium - then it is virtually certain that you will have at least 1 Mb of video RAM, so set -M1024, and try -D3 as follows: UNIVBE -M1024 -D3 If you have a 386 PC, or a 486 machine bought pre-1993, you may have to be satisfied with UNIVBE -M256 -D2 or, at a pinch, UNIVBE -M512 -D3 If you get no joy, experiment with variations on the above for a while longer, re-booting between each attempt, since you never entirely know your luck... And don't forget, if the screen scrambles alarmingly, don't panic: just hit the reset- button quickly or CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart your computer. You're then ready to try another combination. If you know the name of the graphics card inside your PC, and UniVBE has failed to detect it (unlikely!), then you can add a third parameter to the command line which will force the VESA driver to use the instructions for that particular card in its operations. first type UNIVBE -s0 for a list of the names the driver will recognise, noting down the number which appears before the name of your card. Then you can load UniVBE with the -S<name> parameter and the two others which we discovered above. It doesn't matter which order you type them, just as long as there's a space between, and a hyphen immediately preceding, each parameter. For instance, you discovered that the name of your graphics chipset was Cirrus Logic Super VGA, and that UniVBE knows it as number 18, so you would type UNIVBE -S18 <and the other two parameters> We would also strongly advise you to try and obtain the very latest shareware version of UniVBE from SciTech Software (USA, Australia, or UK) using the sources listed at the end of this document. Don't forget also to read through SciTech's own documentation thoroughly, specifically UNIVBE.DOC. I hope I have enabled you finally to consult your Electric Planisphere. If not, your last recourse is to drop us a line, with details of the problem, your system, and as much explanation of what exactly happened and what didn't as you can cram onto the page. I will have a final go at helping you. Roger Hughes Swimming Elk Software Manskiventie 1031 16790 Manskivi Finland. E-mail: Swimming.Elk@sci.fi For last minute Coeli updates and information, point your Web browser at: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/coeli/homepage.htm * The best universal VESA driver is undoubtedly UniVBE from SciTech Software. If you don't already have a copy of UniVBE, it can be obtained easily from the following sources: The Public Domain and Shareware Library (PDSL) Winscombe House Beacon Rd Crowborough East Sussex TN6 1UL United Kingdom Just ask for disk number 003813, where it will be found among several other graphics utilities. PDSL's catalogue describes it as the Universal VESA VBE v.4.3, 'a small TSR providing the latest VESA BIOS extensions for most SVGA cards on the market' Here are some numbers for PDSL: Tel. 01892 663298 Fax. 01892 667473 BBS (8,N,1) 01892 661149 / 667090 / 667091 Or, if you have a modem, try one of these: World Wide Web : http://www.scitechsoft.com Internet/FTP : ftp.scitechsoft.com Compuserve : GO VESA (file library 12) America Online : Keyword VESA Finally, SciTech Software's own direct mailing address is: SciTech Software 5 Governors Lane, Suite D Chico, CA 95926 USA Tel. (orders only) : 800-4UNIVBE : 800-486-4823 Main & Technical Support: 916-894-8400 Fax 510-208-8026 UniVBE is copyright (c) 1993-94 SciTech Software. Coeli (TM) and its documentation copyright (c) 1995, 1996 Swimming Elk Software. All other registered trademarks and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.