I recently picked up a Fujitsu Lifebook C325 and restored it to life. As much as I like this machine, it has a Trident 9388 chip onboard, which suffers from the dreaded scrambled/split screen bug in several DOS games (Asterix & Obelix and Inner Worlds here):
I tried running UniVBE 6.7 to see if that changes anything, but sadly it doesn't recognize the chip as a supported card. I've heard there's supposedly a modified univbe.drv driver, that has support for these Trident chips, but I couldn't find any that would work. Any idea or hint if that issue's even fixable on this card?
Sorry for doubleposting, but I just couldn't leave it alone and decided to dig further into the world of old Trident chips. While looking around for any clues, I stumbled upon an old DOS utility disk, with several interesting programs, like SETPCI or SETBOARD. There was also one called SVM, that let me choose a video mode:
Curiously, when I chose 320x200 @ 256 colours right from the get go, it resulted in a garbled screen, like the one above. However when I chose 320x200 @ 16 colours first, and then the 256 mode, it actually worked... Even the aforementioned games started working again!
What's left for me to figure out is the bottom display in Inner Worlds, as it's still garbled, but at least the game itself seems to be running just fine! Any ideas for this particular problem?
Kurasiuwrote on 2020-12-11, 18:26:Sorry for doubleposting, but I just couldn't leave it alone and decided to dig further into the world of old Trident chips. Whil […] Show full quote
Sorry for doubleposting, but I just couldn't leave it alone and decided to dig further into the world of old Trident chips. While looking around for any clues, I stumbled upon an old DOS utility disk, with several interesting programs, like SETPCI or SETBOARD. There was also one called SVM, that let me choose a video mode:
Curiously, when I chose 320x200 @ 256 colours right from the get go, it resulted in a garbled screen, like the one above. However when I chose 320x200 @ 16 colours first, and then the 256 mode, it actually worked... Even the aforementioned games started working again!
What's left for me to figure out is the bottom display in Inner Worlds, as it's still garbled, but at least the game itself seems to be running just fine! Any ideas for this particular problem?
...Possible hardware issue (maybe bad VRAM or caps)? I have a ThinkPad 560E with a Trident Providia Cyber9382 (an earlier version of the 9388) and I didn’t see any issues whatsoever with the 2 games you mentioned - didn’t even need the utility to set the correct video mode first.
I think it's a hardware bug. My Lifebook C325 shows exactly the same symptoms.
I solved most of it by changing to video mode 0x13 (320x200 pixels, 256 colors) twice in a row, which fixes the garbled screen (Asterix & Obelix) and half-height (Inner Worlds title screen) issues displayed in the first post. I wrote myself a .COM file containing the following assembly instructions:
1mov ah, 0Fh 2int 10h ;get video mode 3push ax 4mov ax, 13h 5int 10h ;set video mode 13h 6mov ax, 13h 7int 10h ;set video mode 13h 8pop ax 9mov ah, 0 10int 10h ;change back to previous video mode 11mov ax, 4C00h 12int 21h ;quit to DOS (exit code 0)
FIXVGA.COM is now part of my AUTOEXEC.BAT on that Lifebook. After this is run, the system displays most VGA games (Doom, Wolf3D, Monkey Island 1+2) fine right from the start. The COM file is actually just 25 bytes, adding it to a zip archive increased the size quite a bit.
As for the problem with the garbled stuff at the bottom of the screen (Inner Worlds in-game screen), that's a something I haven't been able to fix. The hardware doesn't seem to support the EGA/VGA split screen feature. Many games that have some sort of a status bar at the bottom of the screen use the split screen feature. Games using this feature include Crystal Caves, Secret Agent, Catacomb 3D (also Abyss, Apocalypse and Armageddon), Hovertank, Vinyl Goddess from Mars and, given your pics, Inner Worlds. There might be even more games out there that rely on the split screen feature, these are just the ones I've come across so far.
I think it's a hardware bug. My Lifebook C325 shows exactly the same symptoms.
I solved most of it by changing to video mode 0x13 (320x200 pixels, 256 colors) twice in a row, which fixes the garbled screen (Asterix & Obelix) and half-height (Inner Worlds title screen) issues displayed in the first post. I wrote myself a .COM file containing the following assembly instructions:
1mov ah, 0Fh 2int 10h ;get video mode 3push ax 4mov ax, 13h 5int 10h ;set video mode 13h 6mov ax, 13h 7int 10h ;set video mode 13h 8pop ax 9mov ah, 0 10int 10h ;change back to previous video mode 11mov ax, 4C00h 12int 21h ;quit to DOS (exit code 0)
fixvga.zip
FIXVGA.COM is now part of my AUTOEXEC.BAT on that Lifebook. After this is run, the system displays most VGA games (Doom, Wolf3D, Monkey Island 1+2) fine right from the start. The COM file is actually just 25 bytes, adding it to a zip archive increased the size quite a bit.
As for the problem with the garbled stuff at the bottom of the screen (Inner Worlds in-game screen), that's a something I haven't been able to fix. The hardware doesn't seem to support the EGA/VGA split screen feature. Many games that have some sort of a status bar at the bottom of the screen use the split screen feature. Games using this feature include Crystal Caves, Secret Agent, Catacomb 3D (also Abyss, Apocalypse and Armageddon), Hovertank, Vinyl Goddess from Mars and, given your pics, Inner Worlds. There might be even more games out there that rely on the split screen feature, these are just the ones I've come across so far.
Thanks for that 😃, it solved the video bug in 13h mode for my Fujitsu E330, I was already getting sad thinking it was a problem in the video memories, it would be terrible as I found out that in Cyber9388 the video memory is contained inside the BGA.
Lifebook C345 owner here - I do have the same issues since this machine also has the Trident 9388 video chip ... and the UGLIEST scaling I have ever seen on a laptop monitor when it comes to non-integer ratios.
on the positive side:
- it has a fully DOS compatible ES1879 sound "card" (yeah, the sound hardware really is on its own PCB)
- CPU speed and RAM size are right on the spot for win9x and late DOS games
- it takes two PCMCIA cards (I have a CF adapter with a 64gig card in the bottom slot for my game CD isos and a 2x usb 2.0 card in the top slot for fast & easy file transfer)
- and it is built like a tank. (it certainly is as heavy)
I noticed the issue with the trident when I tried to run a couple of benchmarks from phil's dosbench pack.
quake @ 640x480 produced totally garbled jailbar ridden graphics like on the OP's first picture, Doom had a split screen thing going with the full image squished in the upper half, and the same image again but with heavy flickering in the lower half of the screen.
fixvga helped to get a perfect image in doom but quake now refuses to run 640x480 it seems - it DOES start up and show a clear picture now, but it must be switchting back to 320x200 because I get the same fps score as in 320x200 mode - that can't be right, right?
the PC Player Benchmark does run @ 640x480 with only some minor glitches left after running fixvga - it still shows jailbar glitches on the very top and bottom of the screen but no comparison to the unrecogniseable mess it showed before.
anyhow, I just wanted to say "thank you K1n9_Duk3"
I have an NEC SX with this Trident 9388 and found this VESA TSR that improves compatibility in some modes; PC Player Benchmark at 640x480, for example. But it does not fix the issue with Inner Worlds.
The BIOS on my card must be different, as I don't have any issue with the Inner Worlds title screen, Doom, Quake, or Duke Nukem with or without this compatibility TSR or FIXVGA.
Thanks for making this thread, and many thanks to K1n9_Duk3 for the the fixvga utility. The fixvga.com worked for me on a Fujitsu Lifebook E350 with a Trident 9388 video chip.
It was giving similar display to the first picture for most games, but I found that starting and exiting a game a couple of times would resolve the problem, which is what the fixvga.com file does essentially 😀
I notice it only seems to do this in actual DOS, doesn't have so much trouble displaying things when starting games from Windows' dos-box.
That VESA utility also clears up the remaining display issues that I could see like the pcplayer benchmark 😀 I was unaware of that cache of drivers.
