Lately I've been fooling around with a lot of 90s demos that supported the GUS and some later ones want 320x200x15bpp. This works fine on my Trident card (forget the exact model # atm sorry) with UNIVBE. I tried an S3 Virge/VX with 4mb and this card apparently does not support 15bpp, even with UNIVBE loaded. My Voodoo 5 5500 also does not support 15bpp and the VBE15BPP utility will alow these demos to load but they look awful so that is out.
So, for you demosceners out there I was reading in some earlier thread on here that the Tseng cards supported them. Was this native support with no loading of UNIVBE? If so what model from that era would be the best? I was looking into getting a Matrox card since they apparently have nice, sharp video but will they support 15bpp natively and if not will UNIVBE make it happen for me?
This is all going into a dedicated machine for playing the demos so I am not worried about having 1280x1024 or higher in Windows or being able to play Unreal 1 with 3d Accel. I may occasionally play some Doom or Quake 1 (in it's default mode) but I noticed pretty much any card after 1995 can play those games properly.
I found out that S3 VBE utility will add the 15bpp modes just fine to the S3 Virge/VX however in higher resolution modes in Windows it is kinda blurry so I'm still all ears if the Matrox can do it properly if those cards live up to their hype.
One particular demo that has not worked properly on any card I've tried is Pandemic: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1400. There is always missing scenes, no matter what card it is.
There is a demo by Success called Puker which has a part with two green bars then its supposed to show a name in red text but I also have never gotten this scene to work on anything I own.
Blurry and very noisy at 1280x1024 unless i go upto 85hz then its kind of blurry enough to give me a headache from trying to refocus my eyes.
1024x768 has ghosting (you can see a ghost image of the mouse cursor, etc) at higher refresh rates, you need like 70hz for it to be usable on the virge. On my V5500 (and really anything else) it will work great at 1024x768 no matter what the refresh rate is.
And to be clear on the demos with various issues I've tried different configs. Like just a pure DOS with no TSRs loaded except running the ultrinit utility, UMBPCI (most demos wont run with UMBPCI so I rarely ever use that), EMM386 (again most demos hate this), and trying it in Windows 9X.
The best way, I've found, is loading the pure dos with no memory managers and no TSRs. Loading up UNIVBE is OK. On the P2 box I run demos on occasionally I don't run fastvid when it's time for demos because I've ran into a very small few where the demo would run kind of choppy with it on.
The hardest part about trying to play all the demos reliably is how they are closed source and nobody really knows whats being manipulated specifically. I don't know enough ASM or have good debugging skills to see what causes these types of problems.
Basically, I had a batch in my path i run called GUSDEMOS.BAT which would load a slightly older version of ultrinit in a different ultrasnd directory and set the appropriate paths. I ran into a demo or two that would never output sound on v4.11 (final DOS drivers for GUS), v3.53, 3.56, and 3.59 all work OK. If you have a GUS MAX you're going to need at least v3.53. I also have it do SET BLASTER= to remove the blaster variable. Some demos would rather go through your SB than your GUS by default, but it is quite rare and I don't want to take the chance. It calls another batch that mutes the sound blaster as the SB and its clones are quite noisy if the volume is raised and some demos are kind of quiet.
Here is my batch files for those who are interested in building a similar setup to watch demos and want some good compatibility. FVOFF.BAT just disables any stuff setup by fastvid which I load automatically in my autoexec.bat. Also, SB.BAT is just my batch file that runs the init utility for the SB16 in DOS and sets up the SET BLASTER environment. The reason for my US init batch to support loading low DMAs is due to some motherboards not having the option for 16-bit delays to be added via the BIOS. If you're running ProPatches Lite 1.61 and start up TNT Doom and finish the first map, during the intermission tally screen you will hear some garbled sounds mixed in with the music. I found from some old usenet post (or possibly the GUS digest) once the Pentium 1s started coming out I guess it was too fast for the GUS and you need to add that 16-bit delays in your BIOS settings or you can get corrupted sound. 8-bit DMA is unaffected apparently.
One more edit here (hah), the cp command is from binutils package of DJGPP. I do some programming in DOS and ended up having that package as part DJGPP and I think its a little more intuitive to just blindly overwrite the ctmix.cfg. Conversely, I have an UNMUTE.BAT which justs does the samething like CTUNMUT.CFG CTMIX.CFG and runs the mixer again.
I think I linked this already somewhere else, but I put vesainfo output of various cards I have here: ftp://78.46.141.148/vesainfo/
There you can find also cards that support 15 bpp at low res modes. Some demos require the graphics card to have a specific memory layout also though.
I did a lot of capturing of dos demos for my YT channel, so if you need to know details for a specific demo to get it running...
It was all captured from a real machine.
Demos can be very finicky when it comes to VESA support. UniVBE was mandatory back in the day, some demos even rely on the way UniVBE organizes video modes, so you're out of luck if your card's own VESA BIOS or TSR behaves differently.
I've found the S3 Trio/Virge cards to be most compatible, they usually work "out of the box", and they are still supported by UniVBE in case of issues (Don't ask me why this apparently didn't work in Maraakate's case).
elianda wrote:I think I linked this already somewhere else, but I put vesainfo output of various cards I have here:
ftp://78.46.141.148/vesain […] Show full quote
I think I linked this already somewhere else, but I put vesainfo output of various cards I have here: ftp://78.46.141.148/vesainfo/
There you can find also cards that support 15 bpp at low res modes. Some demos require the graphics card to have a specific memory layout also though.
I did a lot of capturing of dos demos for my YT channel, so if you need to know details for a specific demo to get it running...
It was all captured from a real machine.
Try the Pandemic demo I linked earlier in the thread. I tried it on THREE different computers! 🙁
As I haven't mentioned a specific setup in the description it did run most probably on one of my assembled systems.
like P3 800, S3 Trio3D on the benchtable.
I guess I'll have to try out an S3 Trio3D and see if that allows it to play. The main test bed for demos is the P2 400 which should be way more than fast enough for most 90s productions.
I can confirm the S3V does not work right with that demo.
Keep in mind the nature of demos makes them temperamental at best. They are almost written to run on one machine
Next up: Matrox Mystique
-edit-
with scitech display docter driver the Matrox is out. Total garbage
My only other guess on figuring out what cards are needed is hoping these demos were part of a competition then find the invitation to this competition and hoping that the info file mentioned that DOS demos will be tested on a blah blah blah... Sometimes they will tell you.
Just tried Byterapers Pandemic demo, final and party version and the demo runs fine with my current benchtable system:
P3 800 MHz, Gigabyte GA-6BXU, 256 MB RAM, S3 Trio3D/2X
MS-DOS 7.1, with no memory manager at all or with QEMM386, doesn't matter.
Tried GUS and No Sound.
Tried S3 Virge/VX and it works too if you load S3VBE20. And I recommend to run FASTVID 111 also.
S3SPDUP has no effect on LFB modes. (but FASTVID does).
There seems to be a lot of variance in BIOS-level VBE support with Virge cards. I have a 486/Virge DX and a K6-3/Virge GX, both of them have no problems with the Pandemic demo.
