I would just choose ATi for backwards compatibility. My GeForce4 Ti4200 backwards compatibility is utter crap. 😠

Thanks. When you say backward compatible, what do you mean: DOS games, old windows games, both?

In addition to proper VESA support (which my Geforce4 didn't give me) driver compatibility and stability with older games are important to me. So I'm curious to hear from people who have success playing a wide variety of old games.

The Geforce cards offer VESA, as do the Radeon cards.

However, the reason VESA doesn't work is because of Windows 2000/XP. If you used Windows 9x/ME it would work perfectly. It's because VESA access the hardware in a way Windows 2000/XP doesn't like, or something like that.

Yes, i am aware of that fact. But ATi cards still work while nVIDIA ones don't. 😎

And by backwards compatibility i mean both ms-dos and old windows compatibility in general.

I had a GF4 Ti 4200 32MB and it works fine with UNIVESA.

The reason VESA is not supported in NT-based OSes on nVidia cards is that not many people care about old VESA games. Apparently, someone at ATI does, so he or she got that thrown into the driver. Big deal, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to go dig up the UNIVESA driver. I found it, and I am about one of the laziest people on the planet.

Where can i find UNIVESA driver, *working* under WinXP ?

I have always thought univesa to be quite old, so no gf4 chipset support. Right?

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

I have always thought univesa to be quite old, so no gf4 chipset support. Right?

Right, but for a different reason. Univesa was created to provide VESA BIOS calls for old cards that did not have complete VESA 2.0 or 3.0 support. Modern cards (like my GeFroce 4 MX440) do have VESA 3.0 support built-in, so you do not need Univesa or similars, but you cannot use it under Windows 2000/XP due to lack of support from vga.sys and the NTVDM in general. This topic has been discussed here several times, but I'll try to present a brief summary of the problem and some alternatives.

Why can't I play games using some VESA modes under Windows 2000/XP? The answer to this question has to be split in two: how to set your card into the desired video mode and how to access video memory.

First of all, to set your card into the correct VESA mode you need access to the I/O ports used by the card, and access to these ports is controlled by the NTVDM and vga.sys, the standard full-screen VGA driver from Windows. From several discussions in this forum we have learned that vga.sys restricts access to some I/O ports based on card model. Most ATI cards and nVidia GeForce 2 and 3 cards have no problem with this, but GeForce 4 MX cards are in trouble because vga.sys won't let the BIOS write to the correct I/O ports needed to switch modes. There are two alternatives to fix this that I know about: there's a patch for vga.sys that "unblocks" access to some I/O ports used by Geforce 4 cards in this thread and there is the new SolVBE driver written by Sol_HSA.

The second part of the problem involves access to the video memory. Some VESA modes require linear access to the card memory, but the DPMI services provided by the NTVDM do not allow this and there is no other way to have direct access to physical memory regions inside the VDM, so you are limited to banked modes. Eventually you need to force a game to detected only banked modes, so you need NOLFB to "hide" linear modes from the list of modes returned by BIOS calls issued by the game. SolVBE also does this trick, showing only banked modes.

Finally, please have in mind that this is a tough subject and results may vary.

Regards,

I dont know about the radeon's I could test as I have one in this box, but when using ati rage pro gfx in some dos games are corrupt especially ones that use 640x480 screen res, this only happens when using windows xp/2k accelerated drivers if I use bog standard drivers then its fine. It also happens in windows 98 when I use any of the last 2 driver releases but when I rolled back 3 versions it was ok, so its somethign recently added to drivers that messes it up, the problem is that windows XP/2k are newer os'es so there may be no gfx drivers that work with the games.

Thanks Major Grubert and others.

I have followed past discussions a little bit regarding the VESA mode problems which affects my Geforce4 ti4200. I haven't tried either solution you mentioned though I may still do that.

This problem with the Geforce4 was one of the reasons for my post in the first place. I want to avoid these and other old-game hassles as much as possible with the cards I'm considering for an upgrade (ATI 9800 Pro or Geforece FX5900XT). Also, I was curious if there's any other factors to compare ATI vs nVidia -- like quality of video drivers, compatibility with glide wrappers and other old-game utilities -- that might make one card or the other more compatible with the widest variety of old windows and dos games.