I'm having good luck with a GeForce FX 5600, believe it or not. Though I suppose I haven't used any VBE 3 specific stuff. It works quite well for SVGA VBE 1.2/2.0 DOS games tho. Better than quite a few other cards that I've tested (lots 🤣). I don't know if Radeons have VBE 3, but they are trouble for VBE 2 so watch out. 😀

According to the author of the UNIRefresh tool, only Nvidia and 3dfx cards support VBE 3. But this piece of information comes from the year 2000, so it might be a little outdated... 😵

The best VESA 3.0 card?

Probably the one I have. 😁 The apex of NVidia VESA 3.0(-) support, the PCI-e v1.0 based BFG 7950GTOC in the 256MB, (or 512MB) DDR3 flavor. Not quite 'state of the art' for the very latest Windows DirectX9/10 games but very good for almost everything else in the Windows (or DOS) world with the correct drivers. Now the WinXP (SP2) VGA.SYS does have to be edited so as to allow all of the 32 VESA modes (including all VESA v1.2 4bpp, 8bpp, 16bpp and 32bpp color modes) and 13 VGA/EGA/CGA modes, plus non-standard ModeX to display in the NTVDM, but the results are worth it...

The NVidia 7950GT VBIOS was subject to the removal of the display refresh code which would allow CRTs to display at refresh rates higher than 60Hz with DOS utilities such as VBEHz and UniRefresh, plus the fact that it does not do 15bpp VESA color modes, together, are the reason as to why I gave it a VESA 3.0 (-) compliance level. 😏 However, the BIOS is editable,*ahem*, if you like like to 'roll your own' and know your way around a table-driven system...

Great card for either DVI or analog VGA connected monitors. Output looks great on a Lacie Electron Blue IV 22" CRT monitor (rebadged Mitsu 2070) and a Dell E207WFP LCD 20" 1680x1050 DVI monitor. You can't go wrong.

dvwjr

All good information. I found on Wikipedia for VESA 3.0 that both Matrox G550 and ATI x800 boards support vesa 3.0, although personally, I like the Nvidia solution. Seems to be best overall, except none I have tried support "Hardware Triple Buffering" according the SDD's test utility. Haven't tried the x800, however.

This is supposed to be one of the features of VESA 3.0, although it's not mandated that a card supports it from what I can tell. Does anyone have a card that actually says it supports Hardware Triple Buffering when doing a scan with SDD's dos vesatest program? This could affect a handful of later games and front-ends, in particular games created with Allegro and ZSNES.

Other than that mystery... I tend to agree that Nvidia is the best solution most of the time, although I haven't tried any of 3dfx's cards past the Voodoo Banshee.

The ATI Radeon actually seemed to offer a sharper image in DOS then all the Nvidia cards I tried. The Radeons seemed to only go to VESA 2.0, however, and I don't think SDD supported them. Therefore you couldn't use VBEHZ and some of the nifty VESA utilities. I'd love to know if it's true what Wikipedia says about the X800 series haveing VESA 3.0 support.

The Matrox is great in terms of image quality and support, but odd things happen... such as many scene demos not working and modes like text-on-VGA-graphics not working properly. I guess a retro gaming card cannot be judged by it's VESA modes alone. Anyone have anything to add?

3dfx cards have lots of VESA issues. Some of them are fixed with the VESAfix util you can get for them. But even with that, I get some strange flickering artifacts in various games. So, the NV cards are better than 3dfx here.

Banshee and Voodoo 3,4,5 are actually fairly similar hardware. Banshee was the "first edition" of their all-in-one tech. Voodoo3 is a Banshee with some fixes and another texturing unit. Voodoo5 is more refined but it still is problematic. The most notable 2D improvement I've noticed between Banshee and later boards is that the later cards don't have corruption with Starcraft's videos. Banshee doesn't work right with them.

As for Matrox, yeah they too are touchy. Some games just won't work with them. Make sure you have the newest BIOS for the card.

I've had plenty of problems with ATI cards. TIE Fighter SVGA, normally not very picky, has locked up with Radeon cards on me.

Always give UNIVBE a shot if you have problems, but it doesn't always help.

I like turtles.

Believe it or not GeForce FX is a great card for older games because it has 8-bit palletized texture support in hardware. They are really fast cards for DX5/6/7/8 games. Good anti-aliasing and you can force some anisotropic filtering to sharpen up textures. I've run Unreal and UT with zeckensack's Glide wrapper too. He says right on his page that GFFX is great for Glide emulation because of the palletized texture support. Although, with UT and Unreal, you're better off with one of the new OpenGL renderers out there.

They also will fit in any AGP slot out there. On the ATI side, you are limited to Radeon 9800 XT and down. 9800 XT is about the same speed as a 5950.

Which games use VESA 3.0? I know of none.

Which games use a 15-bpp mode? I know of one, Elder Scrolls: Battlespire, and it has a 16-bpp patch.

I don't know of any games that use it either, unless you count some of the DOS ports of the Allegro games on http://www.allegro.cc/

(which are really worth checking out... nice candies for a retro system, even if only 10% of them have a DOS port readily available- but if you have lots of time I guess the majority of them could be ported)

Anyway, the things that use VESA 3.0 that concern me mostly are

-Game Launching GUIs
(Glaunch, AdvancemMENU I think both can use Vesa 3.0)
-VESA Utilities
Particularly VBEHZ
-Emulators
Most of the good "advanced" ones such as DMAME, DMESS, ZSNES

I *think* that maybe some of the really late DOS games might be able to use VESA 3.0. Star Control 3? Maybe MDK?

I'll keep my eyes peeled next time I explore the subject on my retro system and see if I can find any actual vintage games that can use VESA 3.

Riboflavin wrote:

Anyway, the things that use VESA 3.0 that concern me mostly are […]
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Anyway, the things that use VESA 3.0 that concern me mostly are

-Game Launching GUIs
(Glaunch, AdvancemMENU I think both can use Vesa 3.0)
-VESA Utilities
Particularly VBEHZ
-Emulators
Most of the good "advanced" ones such as DMAME, DMESS, ZSNES

Can't they use VESA 2.0 as well? And is there any drawback for using those apps with VESA 2.0 ?

Riboflavin wrote:

I *think* that maybe some of the really late DOS games might be able to use VESA 3.0. Star Control 3? Maybe MDK?

Well Star Control 3 works fine on my old Matrox Mystique, and IIRC it only supports VESA 2.0. MDK is better played on Windows using GLide or Direct3D. 😀

What is the advantage of using these DOS console emulators vs. Windows?

What's the advantage of DOS?... don't get me started! 😁

There are advantages and disadvantaged to using straight DOS...

It is harder. This could be an advantage if you like a challenge.

Other than that, my main reasons for preferring DOS over Windows is...

-Native "world" of DOS games. (so emulators can co-exist with DOS games in your rig)
-Maximizes CPU power (good way to show off real power of old computers)
-DOS can be booted quick, without Microsoft's logos everywhere.
-JPEG-showing programs, batch files, Front-ends, and music TSRs, you can make your own game-oriented "OS".
-It's surprisingly powerful. You can even view DIVX and WMV movies in it.
-It's an empty canvas that's very retro-friendly.

(Dan steps down from soap-box.)

Are there any advantages to using VESA 3 over VESA 2? I have to admit, you have to look very hard for an example. So yes... Not very many.

And all those programs mentioned DO work without VESA 3.0. I think they can take advantage of a few features of VESA 3.0 if it is there. However, I don't think VBEHZ works with a VESA 2.0 card unless you use SDD. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I did a lot of testing over the following graphics chipsets...
Nvidia Geforce 2MX
Nvidia Geforce 4MX
Nvidia Geforce 4ti
Nvidia Geforce FX 5200
Nvidia Geforce 6200 AGP
Nvidia TNT2
Diamond Viper TNT (riva?)
Matrox G550
ATI Radeon 7500
ATI Rage Pro 32meg
3dfx Banshee AGP
Intel AGP Chipset that I can't remember the number of.
Other random cards I had gathered (if really interested in the experiences, ask or PM me).

All the Nvidia cards performed almost exactly the same for DOS graphics-mode compatibility except the 6200, which I don't recommend for retro DOS rigs (although i can't remember why off the top of my head, I just remember it gave me trouble). I do remember that the Geforces performed faster in ZSNES than the TNT2 and RIVA. I have an AGP 1x slot, btw... and all the Geforces used it fine.

The Radeons had a noticeably sharper picture (blacker black areas on monitor, sharper pixel edges also). They only supported Vesa 2.0, which seems okay in most situations, except I had trouble with the following emulators (originally set up for the Nvidia)...

-Magic Engine (unsupported graphics mode).
-ZSnes (Triple Buffering had to be manually enabled from the GUI, since this really IS a feature of VESA 3.0, but the authors of that emulator have a tweaked hack to enable it with VESA 2.0 cards)
-Many demos did not work.

Most of these issues are actually card-specific, rather than VESA-support specific, since I had even MORE trouble with the Matrox G550, even though it supports VESA 3.0 (and I had the latest BIOS flashed on it).

I concluded that a Geforce 2 - Geforce FX really is about the best choice overall for a retro DOS rig (with the help of a Voodoo 1 or 2 maybe, if you really want to pimp your ride). Still, there are a few things to really be desired about a Geforce...

-Support from SDD (if for no other reason than for old games to work, or to turn off VESA 3 or 2 for some game-specific reason).
-The enviable sharper image of the Radeon.
-The damn flicker glitch when using triple-buffering in ZSNES and a few other programs.

So those are my experiences and opinions. I hope they help the retro gaming work in some way. 😅

You saw a sharper image with a Radeon than a GeForce FX? I know that GF3 on down frequently had really awful output quality, but GF4 and later addressed that very well.

Yeah, that's what I heard too. I can only say what I saw first hand, and it's based on some pretty arbitrary factors... namely my eyeballs and this aging dell 17inch crt.

You are right in that the Geforce 2mx and the TNT2 seemed to be blurrier.. especially around the edges of the pixels horizontally. The Geforce 4TI and FX 5200 seemed to be an improvement there.

What all the Geforces seems to have in common, in regards to using them for hard-core DOS retro gaming, is they seem to have a grayer absolute-black pixel when you ramp up the display frequency. Meaning, if you take a mode like 640x480 and display it at 60hz, then 120hz (using VBEHZ or some other tool to do this)... you will see that the dark areas aren't nearly as dark in 120hz mode, but have a gray shine to them.

Now, maybe that is the monitor phosphorescence not having a chance to "unglow" after the electron beam sweeps across it, since it scans the screen twice as fast at 120hz... yes. But even so I swear I saw much less of this gray-brightening effect with a Radeon using the same monitor. I could be wrong though. I just remember thinking that using the Radeon was like having brand new eyewear.

Interesting. I might have to give a Radeon a go again. It's too bad that they have issues with some VESA-using games cuz otherwise they are certainly great cards. I have an original Radeon, a 7500, and a 8500 in the great archive drawer at home.

I've never been one to go after refresh rate tweaks in DOS though. I probably didn't even realize refresh rates were adjustable until the Windows 95 era . 😀 I think you were limited to 60Hz in DOS until VESA 3 though anyway, right? Or did the old proprietary graphics card utils let you adjust that? And Windows 3.1 @ 640x480 60Hz on a poor 14" CRT didn't bother me either (refresh was probably the least of the problems).

I know what you mean. I would never have tried messing with something like this... but the drive for the perfect retro gaming experience eventually lead to me experiment with this stuff. I tried VBEHZ when I was attempting to figure out the nvidia triple buffering flicker glitch. Couldn't get the glitch to go completely away, but solved a few problems I didn't know I had. Namely...

I found out that the frequency rate of many of the NVIDIA modes is NOT 60hz by default in DOS, but sometimes 75hz to upwards of 100hz, depending on the resolution. This is interesting especially with emulators, because a real TV frequency (at least NTSC) is just about 60hz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC

So what does all this mean for playing games? Well, VBEHZ can let you tweak the total pixel count and frequency to strike an even match between a real television refresh rate, and the actual resolution (or multiple of) the game system from the emulator.

This means, completely silky-smooth scrolling and an image that perfectly fits on the monitor.

I always wondered why, even with a computer that was fast enough to do vsync without any frameskip, I would still see the occasional 'bump' in a scrolling background in an emulated game. This was the reason!

Once I matched the screen refresh rate to the rate of an actual television, the results were just about as perfect as you could get. Also, by careful adjusting of the amount of total pixel resolution in the mode you are going for (using VBEHZ) the game could be adjusted to be perfectly centered and stretched on the monitor without any interpolation.

I've heard that Geforce 3+ have a "locked" frequency, and therfore UNIRFRSH doesn't work in later Geforces. Seems to be true, since I've never been able to get UNIRFRSH to work. But VBEHZ does not seem to have this problem at all.

Since VBEHZ is a tiny TSR you can turn on and off (but not completely remove from memory, sadly), you can activate it within a batch file when launching games from an emulator that benefits from it.

If this tempts anyone to "got there"- Keep in mind that this is a rather difficult program to use, especially to figure out. I've never found a FAQ on it, and just learned it by trial and error. I'm kinda amazed that I didn't make my monitor explode. If you spend enough time with it, the results can be worth it, especially if you are fond of Genesis, SMS, and SNES games.

That's my two-cents on frequency adjusting in DOS. If it wasn't for the nvidia triple buffering glitch I never would have figured this out. So, yay? 😒