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["Samual Acorn" <sam.acorn AT gmail.com>]

heres freeware s3 specific vesa tsr;
http://mephitus.no-ip.org/archive/Software/DOS/Utilities/s3vbe20.zip
only gives vesa 2.0 but hey... its free..

...tho i still think using dos tsrs of any kind with linux is a bad idea....

note: link will only work at night... 7pm to 7am...

On 27/02/07, sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> We have several computers with onboard i810 video and no AGP slot, which
> we replaced with PCI video.  I also like to put in both MGA and VGA cards
> in my computers (and the MGA coexists with PCI but not AGP).
>
> Most of our PCI video cards either are VESA 1.2 (the S3 Virge, Trio64,
> Trident, Cirrus, older ATI) and/or have only 2MB video RAM (not good for
> 1280 res with Xvesa).  Exceptions are one Nvidia Riva TNT with 16MB (which
> does not work with mplayer with -vo cvidix - it is transparently visible
> over the console screen and loses sound, or at all with svgalib, or with
> fbdev - it comes out mono, or with rivafb and xfbdev - all blue), and an
> 8MB ATI (need to bypass himem.sys with F5 for Xvesa or use SVGA server )
> and one Matrox with 4MB that works well.
>
> David Moberg compiled a vesafb kernel that was supposed to be patched to
> work with S3 cards in framebuffer mode but did not.  Framebuffer console
> mode gives you more text on the screen (and nicer looking than vga=ask,
> and far more stable).  It requires support of higher number video modes.
> Framebuffer is also required for xfbdev (which like Xvesa won't work in
> 8-bit color).
>
> While reading the online mplayer documentation about video (in case I
> could get cvidix or fbdev configured to work), I ran across mention of
> using Scitech Display Doctor in DOS before booting linux.  From floppy
> boot disk would even work.
>
> sdd653-d.exe  Shareware.  I used to use the older univesa to upgrade ISA
> cards so they would display 1024 at 256 colors in DOS programs.
>
> On the 200MHz SOYO with Virge card I typed the file name and it extracted
> itself, then I typed install and it installed to default directory c:\SDD.
> I then typed univbe (with monitor turned of as instructed) and it beeped
> once.  Turned on the monitor and my VESA 1.2 card with 23 modes was now
> VESA 3.0 with 69 modes. (Until I reboot, so the batch file for starting
> linux should include univbe before loadlin.)
>
> Booted with a vesafb kernel (not patched for S3) and vga=788 and it
> produced framebuffer console (more rows and columns of text).  xfbdev also
> worked perfectly.  S3 cards are very well behaved.
>
> So I tried fixing the Riva card with it.  First, the file would not
> self-extract, even with mo'slo.  Divide error.  This is a 1.2GHz computer.
> pkunzip extracted it. Install extracted the other files.  univbe told me
> my card was not supported.  Too new?  It is already VESA 3.0 but not fully
> compliant.
>
> I don't NEED xfbdev or cvidix.  This card works with Xvesa and -vo vesa.
>
> Virge cards come with (or can take) 4MB RAM and are pretty common.
> There is no s3 vidix library in the mplayer package from David.
>
> I have not tried running display doctor on the i810 video to see if it
> would work better with Xvesa, or even if it would work at all.  It may be
> too new to be supported by this 1998 program.
>
> Sindi
>
> keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
> SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org

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--sam
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Skype; Mephitus
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