hey Gubert?

does putting \basevideo before any other commands solve the distortion problem?
example?

\basevideo
nolfb.com
duke3d.exe

it worked for me.

Well, according to the MS thing Grubert pointed to, /BASEVIDEO should only work if inserted in boot.ini on startup! Not when run during any old CMD window!

So, it may help, but I don't think it's doing what you think it's doing.

Still, what does Grubert think?

That makes sense. It would be a horrible solution: you'd have to make the change and then restart Windows. It would come up in 640x480 with 16 colours until you took it out and rebooted. Yuck.

Schadenfreude wrote:

Well, according to the MS thing Grubert pointed to, /BASEVIDEO should only work if inserted in boot.ini on startup! Not when run during any old CMD window!

So, it may help, but I don't think it's doing what you think it's doing.

Still, what does Grubert think?

I really don't know any command or utility called "basevideo" on Windows XP, but since I don't have a computer running XP right now I cannot double check.

Duffman, are you sure that nolfb isn't the one responsible for your success? By the way, are you running the .bat file with nolfb and duke3d through the launchpad? If you are using the launchpad, do you have the option to "Enable basic VESA support" enabled or not?

Thanks,

Strangely, nolfb did not solve the problem by itself, for some reason my video card still had distortion problem. but when I use the \basevideo command, CMD says that it is not a valid command! something must be fixing it.

whats this launchpad you mentiond?

Duffman wrote:

Strangely, nolfb did not solve the problem by itself, for some reason my video card still had distortion problem. but when I use the \basevideo command, CMD says that it is not a valid command! something must be fixing it.

I'll take a closer look at this as soon as I install a copy of Windows XP (too much work in the real world, too little time to spend inside the Garage).

whats this launchpad you mentiond?

It's the VDMSound Launchpad, a graphical interface for VDMS that allows you to create "VDMS shortcuts" for your programs. Each shortcut stores a different setup for an exe or bat file and you can run the program with a double click on the shortcut itself. You also get a graphical interface to change the configuration for each program, such as memory, sound and joystick parameters.
To get the Launchpad, take a look at this thread: showthread.php?s=&threadid=1226.

Regards,

Gubert? are u a programer?

Duffman wrote:

Gubert? are u a programer?

I used to be, until the day someone called me a manager and I went shopping for a tie 😉

Ok, seriously, I have worked as a programmer for a few years, in Windows and Unix environments. Now, in my free time, I take a look at some open source projects to study them and see if I can learn something new and maybe fix a bug.

Regards,

can visual basic or similar read a dynamic link library?

I can answer this one for you: yes. DLLs are just program extensions, it all depends what their calls are and possibly what language they were originally written in.

what do u reckon the DLLs that windows depends to operate on were written in?

Duffman wrote:

what do u reckon the DLLs that windows depends to operate on were written in?

Prolly' C++ and inline assembly, but I dunno for sure. There was some Europe or Asian country that made a deal with M$ recently, they'd install their products if they got to see the source. Go ask them! 😁

Duffman wrote:

can visual basic or similar read a dynamic link library?

If what you're asking is can VB call the functions in a DLL - yes, depending on how the DLL is written.

Visual Basic requires DLLs to handle their own stack clean-ups (also known as the 'stdcall' method'). A DLL written with the 'cdecl' method cannot be used with VB, as you will get a bad DLL calling convention error.

i.e.

__declspec (dllexport) void _stdcall function() -> works with VB

__declspec (dllexport) void function() -> won't work with VB

A fine example of this is the WNASPI32.DLL ASPI layer DLL; in order to use it with VB, a 'wrapper' DLL that calls the functions in WNASPI32 with the stdcall convention is required as a go-between.

guruman wrote:

If what you're asking is can VB call the functions in a DLL - yes, depending on how the DLL is written.

Visual Basic requires DLLs to handle their own stack clean-ups (also known as the 'stdcall' method'). A DLL written with the 'cdecl' method cannot be used with VB, as you will get a bad DLL calling convention error.

I did not know all the technical details about this when I wrote some VB code, but I do remember writing a C wrapper object in order to call a specific DLL in VB.

By the way, Duffman, what kind of DLL are you trying to call from a VB program?

Regards,

would it be possible to write a vga DLL alternative driver to act as a secondary display driver for DOS THAT just emulates VESA DIRECTLY from the graphics card ignoring XP

Duffman wrote:

would it be possible to write a vga DLL alternative driver to act as a secondary display driver for DOS THAT just emulates VESA DIRECTLY from the graphics card ignoring XP

AFAIK, no driver can "ignore" XP. To program a device driver, you must use the Windows XP Device Driver Development Kit.

Still, I like the idea of the solution being a "secondary" display driver. neato!

But you can't write this thing with Visual Basic, so I fail to see where that fits.

What about any of the microsoft visual languages? or wont they work either?

Duffman wrote:

What about any of the microsoft visual languages? or wont they work either?

You program a device driver using Microsoft Visual C++ and the Windows DDK.

...

It doesn't seem that you know how to do this... at least to me... or you would know this already.

To amend what I have said:

You CAN write a program that goes through Windows XP's protection against giving programs direct access to hardware. GIVEIO.SYS and other drivers do this for memory and I/O. And AdvanceMAME/AdvanceCAB has done this for video (and VESA1, but not VESA2 yet...). But it can potentially make the computer unstable, which is why Windows XP does not permit it in the first place.

... which is why a different sort of driver and method is necessary, we think.

I only started on programming 2 months ago, guess VESA is too advanced for me yet

Much better would be to emulate vesa using directdraw, combine a kernel driver with a vdd and a small tsr .