VOGONS


First post, by charlie3

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I use an old CAD package Tango PCB and SCH made in 1992. I have been trying to get it to work on Win XP. DOSBox got me closer to working. Here's my issues....
1. tango will work in 640x480 vga mode, with or without dosbox.
2. without dosbox, tango will give error if trying to use any of tango's vesa drivers, Graphics Driver incompatible with hardware.
3. with dosbox, tango will work using tango's vesa800 driver in 800x600 16 color mode.
4. with dosbox, Using Tango's vesa1024 driver (1024x768x16color), screen is messed up...top third of screen overlays bottom third, but the info that is supposed to be in the bottom third is there also. see attached picture of screen.
5. with dosbox, using tango's vesa1280 driver, get an error, Initialization Error, Graphics Driver incompatible with hardware.

I have tried several of the video card specific drivers (like Trident1024) and if they load at all, the display is like the attached picture except overlaid so many times it is unreadable.

I tried getting the latest dosbox build, but it gives me errors that various dll's are missing when starting dosbox (LIBPNG13.dll missing). But going back to the January 8th build, it will run, and I get same results #3, #4, #5 above. I initially tested with 0.65.

I would really like to run 1280 resolution, but 1024 would be ok. Any suggestions on what to do to get vesa working? Should I be looking somewhere else other than dosbox to get XP to do this directly, since it will do the 640 vga mode?

I used to run vesa1280 on a Pentium II 300Mhz, Win 98, Trident 3D image 9750 4MB video card with no troubles.

Now trying to get it to work on an Acer Aspire 9500 series laptop, 9503EWSMi, Celeron M 370, 1.5Ghz, 400Mhz FSB, 1MB L2 cache, 17"WXGA TFT LCD, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 series (915GM/GMS, 910GML Express chipset) set to use 64MB of RAM, total of 1G DDR2 RAM, Windows XP PROfessional.

thanks.

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Reply 1 of 7, by DosFreak

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Try CVS build in my signature.
Download ykhwong's
Modify the dosbox.conf and you can change the video card to Tseng or Paradise.

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Reply 2 of 7, by mf2hd

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Hello,
Did you tried to run it from dbox with vasyl's patch (svga emulation)?
Here the h-a-l's link:
http://home.arcor.de/h-a-l-9000/

Download the "Parallel Port Passthrough" and "dll package" (libpng13,...), too.
Put these last ones in dosbox directory.
Open dosbox.config with an editor and set a video card under [vga] :
example :
svgachipset=et3000
videoram=1024

If it doesn't works, try other settings (see "Select one of the following supported SVGA chipsets:" in dosbox.config.

_mf2hd_

Reply 3 of 7, by charlie3

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Thanks, got to the next level.
Both ykhwong's and h-a-l's appear to fuction identically. By setting conf to et4000new I can tell Tango to use tseng1k to get a 1024x768 display.

With this setting or any other than s3, Tango will give an error if trying to use vesa. With conf set to s3, and tango with vesa1024, the lower third of the screen disappears as attached to this post. So, no ovelap, just the bottom part doesn't show up. I don't need this to work, since the tseng will give the same resolution, just thought someone would want to know.

No matter what setting I pick in the conf, tango will give an error when using vesa1280. Just doesn't like the 1280 I suppose. And, the vesa driver is the only one supplied with tango that goes beyond 1024 resolution. I don't think Tango released the 1280 vesa driver until sometime between 1994 and 1999.

So, at the moment, the et4000new and tseng1k gives me the best unless someone happens to know how to get vesa1280 to be recognized by Tango???

Thanks to the both of you. 😀

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Reply 4 of 7, by vasyl

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Try loading Tseng VESA TSR -- there is one on ykhwong's site. The utility is typically called tlivesa or tlivesa1. There is a known problem with that TSR that it messes up video after loading with newer ET4000 (hence the difference between et4000 and et4000new chipsets). You can work around by starting it and the app from batch file. Only et4000new supports 1280x1024 if that's what you need.

Reply 5 of 7, by charlie3

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I am wanting 1280x1024. I tried et3000, et4000 and et4000new with tlivesa. Didn't work. With et4000new, the dosbox crashed with Exit error, CPU:GRP5 Illegal call 7.

I saw your comments on August 23, 2005 when it appears that a change was made to tlivesa and thought that may be the time the file became tlivesa1. I could not find tlivesa1 anywhere in a quick search. The tlivesa I have has date August 6, 2005. Do I need a newer version?

thanks again.

Reply 6 of 7, by vasyl

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tlivesa.com is 3389 bytes, tlivesa1.com is 5024 bytes. I've included both in the attached archive so you can check if any of them works better than your version.
It may be that Tseng VESA support is just not sufficient for this app -- the driver is quite primitive. You may want to play with UNIVBE as well. Also, you can get only 16 colors in 1280x1024 because ET4000 could not address more than 1MB of RAM. BTW, when you tried S3, did you put anything in "videoram" field in dosbox.conf?

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Reply 7 of 7, by charlie3

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thanks, tried both, but didn't work at 1280. But then I realized I had a different problem. My notebook display is 1440x900 and the vesa1280 is looking for 1280x1024. So, I guess it shouldn't work. I did try setting my videoram to different amounts from 1M to 8M.

Thanks for the help, guess I stick with the tseng1024 mode.