VOGONS


First post, by smevans526

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Dear All,

I am using a first generation IBM APTIVA (486-DX2) as my early nineties DOS machine. It uses PC-DOS 2000 and favours a 5.25" Floppy over a CD-ROM drive.

Anyway IBM integrated a Cirrus CL-GD5428 on the mainboard (1M of memory). The riser card contains only ISA, so I am stuck with a more than acceptable chip for my purposes. In fact, I thought that I would never need to worry about SVGA until I found realised that SIMLIFE can run in 800x600(16 colour).

It didn't load properly so I figured that I would try booting a VESA driver. Cirrus's driver will only install under Windows 3.1, which this machine lacks. Thus I experimented with UNIVBE.

An old UNIVBE version (2.0 maybe?) detected the chip put proved futile against the SIMLIFE's high resolution.

UNIVBE 6.7 claims that no SVGA compatible chip is present. I saw the CL-GD5428 listed as a compatible with UNIVBE 6.7. I tried some older versions, only to get something like 'unable to write to input file'.

While the correct answer to my question is 'Who cares? Play something better than SIMLIFE', I would still appreciate any feedback. Also note, I am aware that UNIVBE may not solve my SIMLIFE issues.

Thank you

Reply 1 of 6, by Scali

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Perhaps you can try some of the stuff here? http://www.dosdriver.de/graph.php
There are some Cirrus Logic TSRs for VESA there, as well as an older UNIVBE which might work.
I know I had a TSR for my CL5428 with my Diamond SpeedStar PRO VLB, and it seemed to work nicely. Perhaps you could locate that software, it might just work 😀

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Reply 2 of 6, by gerwin

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I succesfully used these versions of UniVBE with a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 VLB graphics card with 2MB video memory:
UniVBE v5.0, Memory occupied 5,5 kB; VESA 1.2
UniVBE v5.1, Memory occupied 8,2 kB; VESA 2.0
UniVBE v5.3, Memory occupied 12,9 kB; VESA 2.0
UniVBE v6.5, Memory occupied 19,8 kB; VESA 3.0

You need to install UniVBE properly, it seeks a file in the root of C: to verify proper installation/registration.
Don't bother with UniVBE v6.7 in DOS, it got a lot worse for DOS with that last version.

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Reply 3 of 6, by xjas

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gerwin wrote:

Don't bother with UniVBE v6.7 in DOS, it got a lot worse for DOS with that last version.

What about it 'got worse'? I run 6.7 on my rig; seems to do its job fine.

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Reply 4 of 6, by badmojo

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xjas wrote:

What about it 'got worse'? I run 6.7 on my rig; seems to do its job fine.

Compatibility with some older chipsets was dropped in 6.7 in my experience. It might not have been intentional, but - as gerwin stated - it got worse for DOS use.

Life? Don't talk to me about life.

Reply 5 of 6, by keropi

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I've also got my share of hard-locks with 6.7 , it doesn't work in all the systems I have. They just added support for newer vga chipsets/systems and somehow broke something that affects old stuff IMHO. Luckily there are older version freely available as well 😀

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