Subject: Re: DV/X support of video hardware To: dsg AT iac DOT es (Diego Sierra) Date: Thu, 6 May 93 11:23:05 EDT From: Stephen Turnbull Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu (DJ's GPP mailing list) For DV/X questions, you can email to 'support AT qdeck DOT com'. You should include your customer number or serial number if you have one. There are also forums on the commercial services (bix, compuserve), and on the usenet (comp.os.msdos.desqview, I think). Regarding the Trident (and various other boards): Look in ...\dvx\server\screens.txt. This will document which boards are supported, and in what modes. For performance reasons, DV/X's server accesses the hardware directly. (Ie, it recognizes chipsets, not boards.) Furthermore, the hardware support is hardcoded into the server. There are *no* drivers for DV/X. (Not in the sense of 'plug and play' anyway.) This is done because it is apparently extremely difficult to get anything resembling decent performance while supporting Windoze in non-full-screen windows. The Trident in particular is *not* supported above standard VGA, or maybe to 640x480 256 colors and 800x600 16 colors. The DV/X server also supports anything supporting DGIS. I believe this is done via software drivers. You take a slight performance hit. Maybe the Trident has DGIS drivers? Quarterdeck's unofficial advice (they don't endorse any particular board, you see) is to get an ATI Ultra series board. (The official line is get a 8514A *register*-compatible board. Only the Ultra series has this. Everyone else uses software drivers. Not even IBM sells the original 8514A boards, and they were Micro-channel only according to ATI tech support.) The reason for this is that the 8514A register-compatible boards have a video-memory aperture feature, and you can put *all* of the video memory into extended memory addresses. Thus DV/X can access the memory directly (a slight performance boost by avoiding bank switching), and QEMM can use VIDRAM to recover an additional 96KB for your DV windows. Personal experience says the old STB Powergraph is plug and play to 1024x768 256 colors. Great for xdvi and xv'ing the swimsuit issue and Voyager photos of Titan and Mars. This should extend to any Tseng 4000-based product. The new STB Powergraph is I believe S3-based and therefore *not* supported above standard VGA. Ditto the Diamond Speedstar. Caveat: this is all based on my imperfect understanding of what the not necessarily fully-informed tech supports at Quarterdeck, Diamond, and ATI say. -- Stephen Turnbull The Ohio State University, Department of Economics 410 Arps Hall, 1945 N. High St., Columbus, OH 43210-1172 USA Phone: (614) 292-0654 Fax: ...-3906 Email: turnbull DOT 1 AT osu DOT edu