bert@helix.nih.gov (Bert Tyler) (03/09/91)
If you are running Windows using an XGA adapter, and have a sense of adventure (that's a synonym for "reckless"), could you try to run Windows in Standard mode and tell me if it works for you? I have been running Windows using my XGA adapter and XGA Windows drivers (both the high-res and the low-res drivers) in 386-enhanced mode for some time with no problems. The other day, I decided to try running in Standard and Real modes to test one of my DOS apps running under Windows. Real mode came up just fine, but Standard mode... Ooohh, was that ugly. Some times Windows froze up solid during its attempt to generate a wallpaper bitmap (any of several of the stock bitmaps supplied with Windows), and sometimes it generated a spontaneous system reboot while trying to bring Windows up. When I selected "none" for the wallpaper design, the result was the spontaneous reboot. This happened using both the XGA low-res and XGA high-rez drivers. Changing my Windows driver to the stock VGA driver solved the problem - but, of course, that wasn't what I was originally trying to test. Important side note: none of the above crashes affected my file systems - "chkdsk" reported no damage afterwards, and I can still run Windows in my "normal" 386-enhanced mode. I would like to verify that I am not looking at a problem with the XGA Windows driver as supplied by IBM before I start ripping apart my CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and various *.INI files, so if anyone else has this beastie and can/cannot bring up Windows in Standard mode with it, I'd like to hear from you. The DOS program I was originally intending to test is a freeware "XGA Programmer's Toolkit" I built which contains routines for DOS programmers to access the XGA's extended graphics modes. I had already found out that the programs failed when run in a DOS session under Windows in Windows 386-enhanced mode [apparantly Windows isn't virtualizing the XGA's extended registers, so the program can't read them] and have added code to the DOS program to fail gracefully under that circumstance, but I wanted to test the program in Standard and Real mode while I was at it. Everything works fine in Real mode, but as I never got Windows to fire up in Standard mode, I never got to test that mode and still don't know what those results would be. BTW, OS/2 advocates shouldn't feel too smug - a friend of mine tried my DOS program in OS/2's "DOS Box", and the program worked great - but when he exited the program (which returns the XGA to its DOS-compatible VGA mode) and returned to OS/2, all of the text was missing from his OS/2 screens! He said it was a real challenge trying to shut down OS/2 gracefully by remembering the approximate location of the "shutdown" option in the list-boxes. Bert Tyler bert@helix.nih.gov