wow I remember running rocklyte/athene linux distro that used snap as the graphics drivers.

davidrg wrote on 2026-02-13, 00:13:

in response to someone asking about it.

That was me. :) Thanks for creating topic here on VOGONS!
It's also worth noting that Kendall had already started giving private access to individuals even earlier, a year ago: https://github.com/kendallb/scitech-mgl/issues/1.

I hope now Univbe can be adapted to support some early 2000s GPUs like ATI X800 or X850 series

So much hard work in this repo by very talented folks to reverse engineer proprietary driver jank.
Any effort to make things compatible with basic VESA and VBE standards is a valiant one and can help to rewrite older busted drivers. Absolutely amazing stuff!

I sent the repo to the current PC/Geos team to see what they can find in here.

I was able to recompile the license generator for the snap graphics apps and also the snap graphics for dos app.

User:
QEMU
Serial:
B3F5-4835-068A-41

That should register the released/archived snap apps from the old Scitech FTP site.

I have been able to install and use the archived snap graphics apps for nt/2k/xp and the provided code will register them.

As for the dos app, the original release was linked to causeway and this caused issues in qemu.

I rebuilt it with open watcom and with dos4gw it loads in MS-Dos and Freedos. Just proving info in case it helps anyone else.

wadrasil, this is valuable and useful, thank you very much for sharing!

But, what does recompiling this prove, unless the code may be updated to fix broken VESA and vBIOses on new integrated chipsets, like onboard Intel GPUs?

Well, it could be used as a springboard for that. A great deal of groundwork is already present, and quite a bit of Intel's data is publically available.

You would likely need to write any additional drivers for devices that are not already supported.

The code does have a generic driver that attempts to offer universal support in a limited fashion, however the windows installers do not install it by default.

The installers could be *fixed* by setting them to install that driver first.

In my testing with qemu, the software would only install if using the ati-card but only worked on the VGA and virtio cards. The driver did not work on qemu's ati cards either.

PCEM, Dosbox etc should not have those issues, because they have more complete device emulation for their graphics cards.