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Freebe/AF installer segfaults

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First post, by megatron-uk

Posted on 
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Trying to run the Freebe/AF installer from (https://shawnhargreaves.com/freebe/) so that I can get the loadable vbe/af drivers out of the exe, but the INSTALL.EXE requires CWSPDMI.EXE in the same directory and every version I've tried (r5, r7) results in a seg fault from the installer:

freebe_install.png
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freebe_install.png
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Is there any magic version of cwsdpmi that works with this? Alternatively, a zip of the Freebe/AF driver package would suffice.

This is the same behaviour on both Dosbox and a real Dos 7.1 machine, btw - so it's not an emulation bug.

My collection database and technical wiki:
https://www.target-earth.net

Reply 1 of 2, by megatron-uk

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Okay, I tried all of the various options for CWSDPMI as listed (http://sandmann.dotster.com/cwsdpmi/), and finally (by process of elimination) found that if you start the Freebe/AF installer as follows:

INSTALL.EXE CWSDPMI -X

... then it works. Apparently the '-X' argument turns off DPMI 1.0 support in CWSDPMI... but you pass it via an argument to the executable you are running, rather than to the DPMI server itself, which is a bit odd.

freebe_cwsdpmi.png
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freebe_cwsdpmi.png
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16.16 KiB
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398 views
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CC-BY-4.0

Hopefully this may be of help to others who want to use the Freebe/AF drivers.

My collection database and technical wiki:
https://www.target-earth.net

Reply 2 of 2, by megatron-uk

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Here's the extract drivers from Freebe/AF 1.2 in chipset sub-folders, along with the notes on each driver from the source code.

You 'install' a driver by copying the relevant VBEAF.DRV to the root of the C:\ drive. Some of them can be configured by running INSTALL.EXE (a bat file is provided to launch it reliably).

So what's the use of this? Well, anything written with the Dos Allegro libraries can (optionally) use VBE/AF drivers to accelerate drawing operations, access the full video card memory, use the full range of VESA resolutions, etc.... and I'm on writing something right now that can do that.

Filename
freebe12.zip
File size
370.23 KiB
Downloads
93 downloads
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

My collection database and technical wiki:
https://www.target-earth.net

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