Hi! Before rebooting my Linux to activate the newest kernel updates, I have booted into DOS to find out how DOS games deal with my new GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card. It is surprisingly bad as a VGA. According to VESAINFO, only packed pixel and direct color modes are supported, with 256 or 65536 colors or 32 bits per pixel. VESA packed pixel modes: 640x480, 800x600 (1024 bytes per line), 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200 (1664 bytes per line!). Modes with 2 or 4 bytes per pixel also all have "round" numbers of bytes per line (1280, 2048, 2560, 3328, 4096, 4120, 6144, 6656 or 7680, all multiples of 128 as you can see). Resolutions up to 1920x1080 :-) As the USB mouse is not supported in my current BIOS settings and I was too lazy to change them, CTMOUSE only attempted to use a non-existing Mouse Systems RS232 mouse. So games requiring mouse input were not actually working, but that is a different story. My board still has a serial port, so I could try an old mouse ;-) Unsurprisingly, quite a few games throw error 200 or run too fast, including the popular Jazz Jackrabbit and the Kamango memory game. IGO works in VGA mode, also in monochrome VGA. Somehow it does not show MCGA properly, maybe tweaking it? For Hercules, CGA, EGA and Tandy, it reports that it could not activate the mode. GOPART (GoPartner by Ingolf Hellmann) sort of works, but one can see that the graphics font is incomplete. It is supposed to work with CGA, Hercules, EGA and VGA. I guess it tries VGA. WARI (Kalaha by ImagiSOFT) fails to enter graphics mode: You would have to play blindly while still seeing DOS text. Ballgame and Mahjongg (by Nels Anderson) also fail to enter graphics mode. I guess this happens with all EGA or CGA apps. Bananoid, which I think uses a tweaked MCGA mode, would work if I had a mouse. A cute little Arkanoid clone. Breakfree, a 3d Arkanoid clone, works, including speaker sound. 20th Century Frog shows no graphics, apparently it uses EGA. I would have thought that it uses VGA. Laserbeam by Proline just shows a blank screen, no idea. Shooting Gallery would work if I had a mouse. MCGA + Speaker. Descent would work, but runs too fast. Probably MCGA, too. The IUS intro, which uses an interesting graphics mode, shows something graphical, but not similar to the intended graphics. Crystal Caves and Commander Keen 1 effectively stay in text mode, apparently failing to switch to EGA (VGA?) mode. In Captain Comic, switching to EGA fails with a message instead. Commander Keen 4 claims not enough RAM is free if no EMM386 is loaded, or crashes if JEMM386 X=TEST ALTBOOT MEMCHECK is loaded. EGAroids (Asteroids) and Alley Cat (an ancient CGA game) fail to enter graphics mode, so once again, you see garbled text. Lemmings does not work, but I may have failed to try all the conceivably supported graphics modes for that one. I once bought a decent Windows port of it on CD, by the way :-) I have not tested Lemmings 3d (needs EMS etc.). Zeliard does work! I would have thought that it uses EGA just like all the other games which do NOT work. Interestingly, the Display Port output is native resolution of my screen at 60 Hz, so the graphics card automatically upscales the resolutions. Raptor does work (not sure whether it would support PC speaker for sound, I just got none) so space shooter bases are covered. Tank Wars (a small MCGA artillery game) basically works, but some areas of the screen are garbled. Maybe a font problem? You may know the genre from Worms and from QBasic Gorillas. Antix (Anti-Xonix) is almost playable in spite of not reaching a graphics mode. Maybe it was meant to be text mode anyway, but the font is off and the game runs too fast. Xonix basically works, just custom chars end up wrong, maybe the VGA BIOS simply provides an incomplete font charset here. Konggame (meant to use CGA 160x100 text graphics) and Pacman just end up in some sort of garbled text mode, not playable. Sint Nicolaas (MCGA Jump and Run) works, with PC speaker. Digger (DigDug clone) also works. Maybe MCGA instead of CGA/EGA? Squarez also works, as does the WOW tracker (MOD player) when you switch it to PC speaker output. Probably MCGA as well :-) Jill of the Jungle does work, MCGA with PC speaker sound. The tiny Super Mario clone "Mario" by Mike Wiering works, althought there is some tearing in the animations. Claims to be 256 color VGA, but probably just uses MCGA graphics? It is interesting that many CGA and EGA games fail to enter graphics mode and fail to detect that they failed. I guess the hardware just supports a subset of VGA and games think VGA support implies support for everything older than VGA. Some games do detect the failure, though! I wonder whether some games would be troubled by the less flexible bytes-per-line with this hardware, but I assume EGA still would not work if you were to use N * 256 bytes per line for it. I expect VESA games to be smart enough to respect the bytes per line of the BIOS instead of just multiplying width by bytes per pixel to guess a value :-p Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
