eL_PuSHeR wrote:I have always thought univesa to be quite old, so no gf4 chipset support. Right?
Right, but for a different reason. Univesa was created to provide VESA BIOS calls for old cards that did not have complete VESA 2.0 or 3.0 support. Modern cards (like my GeFroce 4 MX440) do have VESA 3.0 support built-in, so you do not need Univesa or similars, but you cannot use it under Windows 2000/XP due to lack of support from vga.sys and the NTVDM in general. This topic has been discussed here several times, but I'll try to present a brief summary of the problem and some alternatives.
Why can't I play games using some VESA modes under Windows 2000/XP? The answer to this question has to be split in two: how to set your card into the desired video mode and how to access video memory.
First of all, to set your card into the correct VESA mode you need access to the I/O ports used by the card, and access to these ports is controlled by the NTVDM and vga.sys, the standard full-screen VGA driver from Windows. From several discussions in this forum we have learned that vga.sys restricts access to some I/O ports based on card model. Most ATI cards and nVidia GeForce 2 and 3 cards have no problem with this, but GeForce 4 MX cards are in trouble because vga.sys won't let the BIOS write to the correct I/O ports needed to switch modes. There are two alternatives to fix this that I know about: there's a patch for vga.sys that "unblocks" access to some I/O ports used by Geforce 4 cards in this thread and there is the new SolVBE driver written by Sol_HSA.
The second part of the problem involves access to the video memory. Some VESA modes require linear access to the card memory, but the DPMI services provided by the NTVDM do not allow this and there is no other way to have direct access to physical memory regions inside the VDM, so you are limited to banked modes. Eventually you need to force a game to detected only banked modes, so you need NOLFB to "hide" linear modes from the list of modes returned by BIOS calls issued by the game. SolVBE also does this trick, showing only banked modes.
Finally, please have in mind that this is a tough subject and results may vary.
Regards,
Major Grubert
Athlon 64 3200+/Asus K8V-X/1GB DDR400/GeForce FX 5700/SB Live! 5.1