VESA (Linear Frame Buffer) support is a kind of acceleration for DOS.

I believe video cards that use BitBLT need a per-card driver to use those features. Each video card that supported accelerated CAD rendering in DOS had a custom driver from the video card maker.

So for BitBLT in DOS for Cool World/Toonstruck, I'd imagine there'd be a custom driver from either the video card manufacturer, or several drivers provided by the game makers, one for each video card. Which is unlikely.

If I'm not mistaken, the VBE/AF extensions offered a standard vendor-independent API for accessing video acceleration features such as BitBLT in DOS.

However, that extension to the VBE standard saw limited uptake, since the industry was already transitioning to Windows by the time it was released.

Basically a similar fate as the VBE/AI extensions for standard vendor-independent sound card support.

It's a shame that these extensions weren't agreed on and released earlier, during the hight of the DOS game era.

Maybe the game you referred to was one of the few DOS games that did support VBE/AF?

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/ques … n-to-use-vbe-af

https://shawnhargreaves.com/freebe/

Probably the best way to solve this mystery would be to get a copy of the game and examine the files included since there would likely be some type of driver. I imagine it would also have something in the setup to enable this (unless it autosensed somehow.)

JensR wrote on 2025-09-21, 09:41:

The review of a PC adventure game (Cool World or Toonstruck?) mentioned that it supported an accelerated graphics card, at a time when most people just had a plain VGA card.

Can you remember what magazine that review might have been in? A lot of magazines have been scanned, and the release time for Cool World and Toonstruck can be looked up, so if there is a limited number of magazines that were available to you at the time those games were released, it might be possible to find the reviews by searching for scanned copies of those magazines.

mkarcher wrote on 2025-09-21, 10:57:

Can you remember what magazine that review might have been in? A lot of magazines have been scanned, and the release time for Cool World and Toonstruck can be looked up, so if there is a limited number of magazines that were available to you at the time those games were released, it might be possible to find the reviews by searching for scanned copies of those magazines.

That is a great idea, I was reading ASM and Power Play at that time. I'll have a browse if I can find that.

So, neither Toonstruck or Cool World mention anything in their reviews, at least in ASM... so a different game. Or I've been hallucinating. Interesting how few PC games were reviewed each month, compared to the flood released each day nowadays...

They probably were referring to local bus video cards (e.g. VLB or PCI). It was common in the early to mid 90s for local bus video cards to be referred to as graphics accelerators.

It might also have referred to MPEG video hardware decoding. Cards with hardware decoding capabilities were also referred to as graphics or video accelerators.