wierd_w wrote on 2023-08-14, 01:24:

Still, the latter isn't quite true. While doom, doom2, and heretic all just fiddle with the bog standard vga interface, descent, duke3d, rise of the triad, strife(?), warcraft 2, and quite a few others all use VBE, and will cheerily use SDD. I would not call it rare.

Yes. a lot of DOS games used VESA BIOS modes. If the VESA implementation of your graphics card was missing or of bad quality, you often could use UNIVBE, which got later renamed to SDD, to get better VESA support. But at this point, we are just talking about using VESA to set a high-resolution graphics mode, to switch banks, and (in case of VESA 2.0) to make the whole video memory visible at once at a high memory address ("linear frame buffer"). We are not talking acceleration (having the graphics chip fill/copy data on its own) at this point.

Wow I just logged on and..I'm not entirely sure what the last few posts had to do with my original question, feels like things have gone a little off topic. However, do appreciate the info regarding the pass through cable, having 3Dfx for quake certainly wouldn't hurt.