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Modern Video card with VESA 1.2 support?

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First post, by emendelson

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If this is the wrong forum for this question, apologies in advance.

I'm hoping to build a dual-boot system that will let me run old graphics apps in full-screen under XP (or using one of the methods that lets Windows 7 run VGA video fullscreen). Is there a modern graphics card that supports VESA graphics modes? I tried a recent GeForce 1030 card, with no luck. Is there anything out there that's reasonably fast in the modern world but still has VESA graphics support built in?

Thanks for any information.

Reply 1 of 4, by Jo22

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Hi, do you mean VESA VBE 1.2 or 2.1 ?

VBE 1.x was real-mode compatible,and usable on any machine and classic compilers,
such as Quick BASIC and Turbo Pascal.

VBE 2.x and higher were accessable via 32-Bit protected-mode and used
by some games using the DOS4GW extender. They also got features like linear framebuffer access, etc.

Modern graphics cards from the late 90s and 2000s are usually VBE 3 comaptible.
That's what several Linux flavors do default to if you have no graphics drivers installed.

I believe VBE3 dropped/deprecated a few of the earlier video modes and colour depths,
but the basics should still work. Just try. 😀

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Reply 2 of 4, by emendelson

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Actually, any VESA version from 1.2 upward will do the job I'm looking for, but 2.0 is probably best. As I said, no luck with a modern nVidia card. For this purpose, I've been using an ancient nVidia GeForce 7600GS card, but it's slow and has other problems that are too boring to go into, but that force me to use something new...

Reply 3 of 4, by Falcosoft

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Although modern NVIDIA cards have a buggy VESA implementation (NVIDIA Kepler/Maxwell/Pascal VESA Bios Bug (workaround found)) they support VESA graphics modes. The problem under XP is the drivers (any attempts to display even non VESA graphic modes result in a blue screen in my case). You can cure the problem by patching
videoprt.sys. You can download the required patch from here:
download/file.php?id=41503

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Reply 4 of 4, by emendelson

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Falcosoft wrote:

Although modern NVIDIA cards have a buggy VESA implementation (NVIDIA Kepler/Maxwell/Pascal VESA Bios Bug (workaround found)) they support VESA graphics modes. The problem under XP is the drivers (any attempts to display even non VESA graphic modes result in a blue screen in my case). You can cure the problem by patching
videoprt.sys. You can download the required patch from here:
download/file.php?id=41503

OK - very useful. The more I think about this, the more I think I should skip XP and and try to use Ludwig Ertl's fix that allows full-screen hardware graphics under 32-bit Windows 7, as described here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/windowsse … html#fullscreen

I've been using this method for a couple of years with my old GeForce 7600GS card, and it works with 1280X1024 VESA graphics. I wasn't able to get it to work with a GT 1030 card, so I'm still hoping to find a modern card that works...

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