maybe ibm 8514 ?

Ah, maybe. It accelerates 2D operations like line draw and color fill, and it was 1987. Amazing.

I wonder though: what old software supported such accelleration? Since it was a DOS era, I imagine software should be written specifically to support 8514 acceleration, am I correct?

I recently found out about this board.
http://www.classicdosgames.com/traditional.html
and then look for Mahjong 8514

I saw in the wiki overthere that it didn't run in dosbox and so...
Maybe there are more games out there that support it.

Whoa, and even ATI Mach 32 did not work. Sounds like those Voodoo1-only games.

As for 8514/A there is some Driver for DOS Shell and Win 3.x available, others probably too. But is there some game with direct 8514/A support?
I'am just curious because I own a machine with 8514/A.

Booting up:
http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/video/einschalten.avi

Pinball Fantasies
http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/video/pf.avi

Win 3.11 with 8514/A at 1024x768x256 colors:
http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/video/win311.avi

Sorry for the rather bad quality, I took the videos with my digital camera (no video camera) and it had some problems especially with the mode in windows.

That's my website that Qbix pointed out. I tried to play Mah Jongg -8514-, with and without RIXAI8.exe (evaluation copy of 8514/A Emulation Program RIXAI Version 1.0), with a Pentium 166 using a Trident SVGA card with 1MB of RAM, a Mach 32, and other assorted old graphics cards that I have lying about. RIXAI would correctly identify the cards, but I still couldn't get the game to work.

Mah Jongg -8514- v0.6 was a public beta, and development stopped when the 8514 standard didn't become widely adopted. I've spoken to Ron Balewski about it, and he wished me luck in getting it to work. He describes broad compatibility in the documentation, so I'm not sure what the problem is. At any rate, I'm not surprised that DOSBox can't run it, given that I can't get it to run on a Mach 32, and since there aren't any 8514 or SVGA machine modes in DOSBox.

I've been reading the Multiple SVGA Chipset patch thread and I'm taking a look at the latest diff. I know how to use patching software, but the patch page says "The diff is made against daily CVS drop 20050427. It may not work against later drops." I hunted around in the CVS depository for a while, but this is unfamiliar territory, so I gave up.

I've taken it as a personal challenge from Ron Balewski to get the world playing his forgotten game. I really appreciate the work you folks are doing to make it possible.

Edit: Elianda, could you please try to play Mah Jongg -8514- with your 8514/a? I'd like to know that it at least works on a real 8514 card.

DOSGuy the builds of ykhwong have the SVGA patch included. (in the development for there is a CVS builds thread)

The configfile gets a few new options regarding which chipset to emulate.

I'm familiar with his site but I never bothered to try it out.

I tried all of the chipsets with no success. I was hoping that RIXAI would detect an SVGA card and help me emulate an 8514/a, but it doesn't seem to be finding compatible hardware.

i'm unfamiliar with the RIXAI emulator. So I don't know why it doesn't find compatibile hardware.

I thought that the et4000 was quite a common and accepted videocard, so maybe it uses an unknown or unsupported detection method.

For me it works with this one and ET4000 chipset:
http://ftp.cvut.cz/local/drivers/vga/ultimus/dos/8514a/

Ah, v1.1! And now it works. My God, it's beautiful! MJ8514 looks so much better than MJVGA. I'm absolutely stunned. Ron kept MJVGA at 16 colors so that he could use 640x480, but seeing it in 256 colors is just amazing.

Cycle count has to be really high, and my mouse still staggers around a lot. There's a small graphical glitch when I try to leave the game, and DOSBox crashes on exit, but otherwise it seems to work great.

Thank you so much to the DOSBox crew, vasyl for creating the patch, and h-a-l-9000 for finding that updated version of RIXAI. Playing mah jongg will never be the same again!

Where can I get this special 8514/A MJ Version?
Link maybe? 😎

eilanda. check my second post in this thread.

DOSGuy wrote:

Elianda, could you please try to play Mah Jongg -8514- with your 8514/a? I'd like to know that it at least works on a real 8514 card.

I tested it out and I could not get MJ8514 to work. It starts up, loads a bit from disk and then stays in textmode.
Does it needs some time after startup until anything happens?

After a bit investigation: The mouse cursor appears (in textmode, like in norton commander), I can move it around, if I click at 'something' in the middle of the screen some deep sound comes from the speaker.

Seems like it doesn't activates the 8514As graphics mode?!?

MJ8514 uses the 1024x768 interlaced graphics mode. Not all monitors from that era could handle that. From the documentation:

"Hardware requirements are rather steep, especially for a game. You'll need 8514/a graphics (a true 8514/a card or a 1-meg Super VGA card with 8514 AI emulation software), a Logitech mouse (or compatible, I hope), a monitor capable of displaying 1024x768 graphics (a standard 8514/a monitor is OK), 640k of conventional memory, and (probably) 2 MEG of EMS 4.0 expanded memory. I'd also recommend a fast processor."

It seems to do some timer stuff, maybe your computer has the wrong speed.
Or is there some additional driver needed?

I am not sure what the program requires except about 2 MB of EMS.
The computer is this machine: http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/ibmpc.html
I haven't had any timer problems with this machine yet.
I also tested with EMM386 from MSDOS6.22 and QEMM97. It is also difficult to imagine that the routines that apparently work somehow (i.e. active mouse, some kind of reaction to movement + click) are related to a problem that somehow the 8514A doesn't get initialized.
I will try a 8514 specific mouse driver now.

Ok I tried with the 8514A driver from Microsoft 1.01.10 that installs if I plug the mouse in the ps/2 port (even the most modern with USB -> PS/2 adapter works 😎 ), but mj8514 shows the identical behaviour, it stays in textmode and if I move the mouse I can click on 'something' that makes deep speaker noise and something that makes a higher noise.

Someone has graphics in this game?

Did the 8514 come with some TSR program?