First post, by zyzzle
I'm shocked and dismayed that this issue hasn't been brought up more frequently -- if at all -- on these wonderful forums. Please forgive me, as this is a bit of a rant of long-standing, but an important one. (if this is posted into the wrong forum area, please advise where I might get a better reply).
Does anyone run DOS bare metal on "modern" systems here? I'm talking about 2017-currrent chips, from the Intel i3/i5/i7 9th gen and up, or any of the AMD Ryzen chips. All of these systems have crappy, abominable, castrated DOS video support, although a 16-bit abstration layer is present many of these do have a "Legacy mode BIOS" and LBA mode support for booting DOS bare metal. The most hideous omission is a *total* lack of any VGA modes, and *any* 8-bit color support for VESA modes. Absolutely NO games run in such systems, for the want of a measly 320x200x8 mode 0x13h or 320x240x8 mode X. Even 640x480x8 doesn't work, and "modern" DOS games like, for example, Quake 2 DOS port, Hexen 2, and "modern" DOS versions of Doom fail to load. System freezes hard when even the fallback VGA 320x200 mode fails.
Why was this done? What's the technical reason? If you're going to go through the trouble of making a "legacy mode" BIOS, why make this totally unuseable with no VGA video and no 8-bit color support. These systems also do not have a LFB, and it's impossible to use write-combining to speed up DOS video access. As an example, I have a Ryzen 2520, only manages 292 mb/sec in 640x480x32 VBE3 mode 0x4101, since it's linear framebuffer has been castrated / eliminated! While an old i7-5500 2015 laptop manages 13120 mb/sec in that same mode 0x4101, with MTRRLFBE and its Writeback-combining enabled and put to full effect in DOS games like Quake, Quake 2, Hexen 2, etc.
If there's no way abound this lack of VGA modes in DOS on "modern" CPUs, is there some sort of DOS utility which will work around this issue? I remember a nifty program called VBEPLUS 0.81, which could "map" new modes to use existing modes in deficient VGA BIOSes. But, it only supports VGA modes, and I can't map, for example 320x200, 8 bit color to 640x480 16 bit color using this utility.
Is there absolutely no way, or other similar utility that can "fool" games which want a simple mode 13h VGA to start up in 640x480x16 as then they would at least run on these modern castrated, onboard video BIOSes. Is there any new possibly hacked video BIOS which can be burned into the VGA BIOS area which will enable and / or add the VGA modes and 8-bit color? Or is that impossible? The hardware must be able to support it, as it can run 16-bit and 32-bit color perfectly well.
Anyone? Need some help or advice here. I don't want to use DOSBox. I wish to run bare metal. There must be some coding experts here who could "fool" the old 1990s games which only want VGA, to instead universally use 640x480x16 or 32 bit instead as a sort of "abstraction" layer.
