hmm shouldn't you hang the mouse on the mouse_interrupt routine ?
or is that one taken by terranova ?

I take the mouse interrupt (int33h), but the mouse callback routine should be called whenever mouse moves, which is the mouse irq interrupt.. which I haven't implemented yet.

Instead, I hooked the timer, for now, and do the callback from there. Like I said above, that's enough for TN; I can fix this later. (Actually, since I need to do all that irq mess with the keyboard, I might as well fix it pretty soon in any case).

New alpha:

http://iki.fi/sol/solvbe_alpha_050304.zip

Now TN is playable - handled the keyboard by passing window events to the console window. Still a lot to do before this is a "complete" product, but I'm going to play TN for a while now.. (I think I'll get irritated by the 320x200 window soon enough though =)

New alpha:

http://iki.fi/sol/solvbe_alpha_060304.zip

Some small fixes and OpenGL scaling, so one can now play terra nova in a fullscreen window. This should be the last daily version for a while (unless I get some actual feedback on this, that is). There's still a lot to do, such as the tweaked modes etc..

To play TN, perform the following steps:
1. Install VDMSound
2. Copy SolVBE.exe and SolVBE.dll into the tnova directory
3. Create a batch file by the name of tnsolvbe.bat in the TNOVA directory, and enter the following two lines there:
-- 8< -- 8< --
SolVBE
__ff
-- 8< -- 8< --
4. Right-click on the batch file and click on "run with vdmsound".
5. Enjoy.

Awesome...

Any thoughts on adding protected-mode support or Linear Framebuffer / VESA 2.0?

Also, does full-screen window still mean full-screen, but with a window-border surround? or does it mean borderless full-screen, switching display modes? I didn't quite understand.

I think a post in Release Announcements with a few screenshots would be cool. Also, do a basic Readme or you'll regret it later. If you won't , I will. 😜

LFB - no, not yet anyway. I don't even know if it's possible to map windows memory for VDM protected mode apps. If there are games that really require LFB and do not have any fallbacks, then it might be worth it..

I know that there are hundreds of demoscene demos that require LFB though =) Most of those won't run under windows for other reasons though (buggy audio systems etc).

It's a resizeable window. The window can be maximized. Full-screen mode isn't there yet. I admit my wording wasn't clearest possible; I just tried to make a distinction between a non-resizeable 320x200 window and a maximized window =)

Release announcements and readme - well, I'm still calling it an alpha for a reason. =)

I'll do another version when it has some new enabling features in it (such as the 320x400 tweak mode in TN).

Oh, does anyone here know any other games that have been impossible to play under windows because of missing VESA support?

Playing with tweak mode support.. results so far:

Terra Nova (optionally) uses 320x400 mode, and its setup is quite straightforward (disables chain-4, enables byte addressing, removes scan doubling - pretty minimalistic). After that, it swaps between planes and writes data; there's no page flipping.

That's the good news.

Then it apparently reads from the screen - I read 535 continuous real plane changes (eg, nothing else seems to happen in between - it just swaps read planes a lot). I assume these reads are related to the mouse cursor.

When it's writing data, it swaps between plane write masks 1,2,4,8 and 0. When the write mask is zero, nothing should get written to the video memory. Why they bother setting the mask to zero is beyond me.

Now, since I can't detect what bytes get read or written, I have to copy the whole contents of video segment every time a plane changes. Okay, it's only 64k, but if I have to do 2x64k memory copy for every pixel in 320x400, that starts to slow down a bit.

If I skip the copy-to-a000 (ie. make vidmem read only), things are marginally faster, but I get trash on the screen since some things (damage indicator and mouse pointer) are updated more often than the rest.

Well, actually the amount of bytes used by one plane in 320x400 is actually 32000, but that doesn't solve the problem..

Granted, 320x400 mode looks a lot nicer. But it's slower than it used to be. Also seems to crash sometimes.

I've also tried to see if I could get Death Rally working. I solved the "bad palette in intro" problem, but I don't get any output in the ingame, and it doesn't seem to be setting up any tweak mode either.

On drally - got it to run fast under normal vdm with a modified cli2nop (there's three occurences in my copy, and the first one should be left alone).

Unfortunately the sound doesn't work, either with vdm, vdmsound (2.01 / 2.0.4) or gusemu.

When running under SolVBE, the cli2nopped version is just as dark in the ingame as the unmodified one, so I'm a bit at loss on what's wrong with it.

I've removed all the alphas now that the beta is out:
SolVBE 1.3b release (VESA driver for WinXP/Win2k)

Sol_HSA wrote:

Oh, does anyone here know any other games that have been impossible to play under windows because of missing VESA support?

Battlespire. I see if I can get it running with this 😀

I think this is a vesa problem, ever since I got windows 2000 I haven't been able to play sim city 2000.
I got VDM sound and I messed around with it finally got the mouse to work with the mouse2kv but it has some black trail that follows the mouse, also all the text is partially covered.
I downloaded the solVBE and added it to my bat file that loads up sim city 2000 and its really clear nice screen and everything but the mouse is not usable and the game is slow. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.