I have two of these cards. I think both of mine are supposed to be from 2theMax. However...

It appears to me that ARK logic was actually the one that produced the board, and supplied it to several different companies. 2TheMax, Hercules (Stingray Pro) and Paradise (Bali 32) are all identical except for the contents of the BIOS. Unfortunately this means if you have a 2theMax card the Hercules drivers aren't going to work. I suspect the driver just checks the header of the card BIOS. I remember trying this a few years back and got nowhere (this was for windows 3.1).
I think in the end I managed to find a generic driver, but I would have no idea where the hell it is at the moment.

The only ARK1000 cards I have ever seen that don't use this PCB are the ones from Octek (ocean technologies). I believe they released 3 different cards using the ARK1000 chipset. Two of them just use different memory packages, and one integrates multi I/O.

From what I can remember, the drivers are pretty barren of features but seems to work. It's a pretty fast card in DOS, but you benefit greatly from using VBE (much better compatibility).

Thanks a lot for the info. Please forgive my ignorance, but when you mention VBE, do you mean that I can use the card with something like "UNIVBE, version 6.7" (which is discussed in this Vogons thread). In this utility's supported chipset list, it mentions ARK Logic ARK1000VL.

I don't know if I know what I'm talking about, but couldn't you perhaps get a dump of the BIOS then modify the hercules driver to recognize the relevant ID string?

It's really frustrating, because I can't test this thing at the moment, and so I don't know what BIOS the card is using. Once I can test it, I'll be able to look at the BIOS POST screen, and see what it says. Failing that, I could run something like Everest Ultimate, and it might tell me information about the BIOS.

You should be able to find out which card you have by looking at the top of the screen when you turn on the computer. The graphics adapter is usually the first ROM on the system, so it should be the first thing displayed when you turn on your PC.

retro games 100 wrote:

It's really frustrating, because I can't test this thing at the moment, and so I don't know what BIOS the card is using. Once I can test it, I'll be able to look at the BIOS POST screen, and see what it says. Failing that, I could run something like Everest Ultimate, and it might tell me information about the BIOS.

Just download NSSI http://www.navsoft.cz/products.htm and do "Save video bios". It dumps video bios from memory to file and then you can easily check who made it.

I had the problem that VSync does not work in VESA modes (as 640x480x256 etc.). Could you check if this is also the case with your card?

Thanks for the info, people! Very unfortunately, I cannot test the card at the moment. I'm not in the same location where the rest of my retro junk is. Sorry about that!

http://www.mmnt.net/db/0/0/ftp.octek.com.au/S … 64__VLVGA1000_V

Try downloading the 3.1/95 drivers for the VL VGA 1000 card at the bottom and see if they work for you.

I am going to make a special effort to reschedule things, and make sure that I test all of these suggestions tomorrow. Thanks a lot for all of them!

elianda wrote:

I had the problem that VSync does not work in VESA modes (as 640x480x256 etc.). Could you check if this is also the case with your card?

Please can you tell me how to test the card in a VESA mode? I'm sorry if some of this stuff doesn't "sink in" sometimes. I've got a lot on my mind at the moment. Anyway, do I:

1) Run Windows 3.x, install the Win 3.x driver, then set the screen resolution to 640x480?
2) Run a VESA DOS game, if so which one?
3) Run Windows 95, install the Win 95 driver, then set the screen resolution to 640x480?
4) Run UniVBE 6.7, and see if that allows me to set the screen to a VESA mode, for this Ark-based video card.
5) Run an Ark-based VBE DOS utility (which I don't have at the moment.)

BTW, what is VESA, and how does it differ from Super VGA? Also, I think that the DOS-based PcpBench benchmarking utility can run in a VESA mode. I could try using that. I'll post back tomorrow with all of the test results. Thanks.

If you want to test the card in VESA mode, you should probably install SciTech Display Doctor (UNIVBE) 6.7. It's a TSR that you can run at your own leisure. It has some built in tests to test compatibility. I believe v6.7 is VESA V3.0 compliant. Most of the later VGA cards had at least some level of VESA compatibility built into the BIOS (usually a crippled version of 1.x), so UNIVBE is still usually required to run DOS games that require VESA support. Back in the days of DOS, there were only a couple of games I ever ran that required it. I think it's mostly the 32-bit DOS4gw games that need it.

My understanding of VESA is poor, but basically it increases videocard compatibility (additional screen modes beyond basic 256kb VGA) and uses some tricks to speed things up a bit. Generally you only need to use it when a game specifically requires VESA support. If you want the detailed version, I'm sure it's available on the wikipedia. A lot of that stuff will probably be way over your head, so you might as well just accept the layman's version.

Super VGA (SVGA) was never really well defined, but generally implied any modes beyond what basic 256kb VGA could handle (320x200@256, 640x400@256 or 640x480@16). So 640x480, 800x600 at 256 colours would both be considered SVGA modes. VESA is just a standing way of getting SVGA modes in DOS. To get SVGA graphics under windows 3.1, most people would install a special driver that only worked with their specific model of graphics card. I think the idea behind VESA was to design a driver that could work regardless of which hardware was installed (so long as said hardware was VESA compliant). I guess you can kind of think of it as DirectX for DOS.

Well thats mostly right.
VESA is infact a organisation of different companies that defined this standard API to use SuperVGA graphics modes. (They also defined (not surprisingly) VLB).
Everything beyond VGA was not standardized. Typical VGA modes are 320x200x256 or 640x480x16.
So VESA defines at APIs to enable higher modes that are implemented as BIOS calls.
There are 3 important versions:
1.x - functions to switch to SVGA modes, the memory of the graphics card is still a 64 kB page within the I/O area between 640kB to 1 MB (at A000:0000).
so f.e. to fill a whole 640x480x256 screen you have to switch through 5 64 kB pages.
2.0 - functions for more modes, especially low res + high color modes as 360x240x16 bit etc. Still support for this modes vary greatly.
- support for Linear Frame Buffer where the whole graphics cards RAM is mapped below 4 GB in main memory. No more page switching. Doesn't work for ISA though.
3.0 - functions for setting refresh rates

So first check would be what VESA functions the BIOS already has, and get a list of the modes supported. (there are tools that dump this list to a txt file f.e.)
Then check if the company delivers a additional VESA TSRs.
Use UNIVBE 6.7, or 5.1. Somehow in most of my systems 5.1 recognized cards where 6.7 failed.

Performance of the API implementation may vary. So using UNIVBE may be faster for some modes whereas with other modes the on card BIOS may be faster.
Usually all of this has nothing to do with Windows, but some windows drivers for the cards have a very good VESA API within the DOS window in W9x, while they do have only a limited TSR for plain DOS. (f.e. Weitek P9100 cards, that have a DOS TSR for 1.04 whereas in a DOS window in W9x they have VBE 3.0).

As for the VSYNC, simply check if the games limit fps to 60. f.e. with Duke3D and DNRATE.

I'm incredibly sorry that I haven't been able to test the Ark card yet. I really appreciate the superb advice given by everyone. Thanks very much, I really appreciate it. Because I don't know for sure when I can test the card, I won't say things like "hope to test soon / tomorrow / that kind of thing". I'll just have to leave it, until it's possible for me to get back to the location where my retro stuff is. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, especially when the help provided by everyone above has been so good!

I have a pci version with upgraded memory if you ever want something to compare it to. I've heard that ark1000 cards do pretty well in dos.

Apparently it doesn't matter if you have 1 or 2mb of DRAM installed on this card. It does not seem to support interleaving, as I have seen no difference in performance whatsoever between the two different configurations.

What I'd really like to see is if there is a difference between the ARK1000 and ARK2000 chips in DOS. The ARK1000 is a 32-bit chip, but the ARK2000 is a 64-bit chip. In theory the ARK2000 equipped with 2mb could be quite a bit faster in DOS. Anybody with ARK1000 and ARK2000 PCI cards that can compare the two?

I also have the same card as pictured in the 1st post and also can't find working drivers for it.

BIOS string is only:
ARK Logic GUI Accelerator BIOS Preliminary Version 1.20 - 0217 Ref 00

Already tried the Hercules and Spea ones but they have some checking routine and won't load 🙁

Any workaround or real drivers from somewhere?

Hmmm ftp://retronn.de/driver/ARK/ARK1000.VLB/

This is my ARK1000VL VLB, it's more or less identical to member retro games 100s card but my card has no soldered memory.

I will test the drivers some time in the future, my VLB project got stalled as I got sidetracked.

elianda wrote:

Hmmm ftp://retronn.de/driver/ARK/ARK1000.VLB/

Not sure what these drivers are. Can get them to work/install under Win 3.1 - maybe for NT. I tried installing ARK2000 drivers and they install OK. Even look right, but there are glitches.

Finally found the drivers that work:
http://driverzone.com/drivers/paradise/bali32/

😀