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From: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: VESA SVGA Standard
Message-ID: <1991Jun15.095553.19990@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 15 Jun 91 14:55:45 GMT
References: <51370017@hpindda.cup.hp.com>
Organization: 'twixt Dali and Dada
Lines: 28

tozz@hpindda.cup.hp.com (Bob Tausworthe) <51370017@hpindda.cup.hp.com> :
| Has anybody heard, or had any experience with, the VESA (Video Electronics
| Standards Association) standard for SVGA? Does anybody use it? Have
| they come up with standards for 1024x768x256 yet?
| 
| Wouldn't it be nice if application programmers wrote their software
| to use this standard and then all the card companies had to do was
| build one VESA driver? Wow!

There is a collection of VESA drivers for svga cards in various archives
(I found it at SIMTEL20).  I use it --- in particular, I run the vuimg
GIF viewer under desqview using it.  The reason: vuimg works fine with
my Paradise-clone svga card alone, but under desqview its higher-resolution
modes get very goofed up (desqview doesn't really support 1024x768 modes).
With the VESA driver, however, it works fine with desqview.

This is at least partly the vuimg driver's problem --- Quattro, for example,
doesn't support VESA but its Paradise driver works properly under desqview.
Having the VESA driver also installed is not a problem.

The VESA driver is supposedly written by Western Digital, the makers of
the Paradise chipset.  Apparently all the drivers were written by the
appropriate card maker.  I find this mildly amusing, as the driver
displays a startup message with a typo in the name:

"VESA Super VGA BIOS Extension v1.00 Copyright (c) 1990 Western Digitial Inc"

:-)