UniVBE
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
UniVBE (short for Universal VESA BIOS Extension) is a software driver that allows DOS applications written to the VESA BIOS standard to run on almost any display device made in the last 15 years or so.
The UniVBE driver was written by SciTech Software and is also available in their product called SciTech Display Doctor.
The primary benefit is increased compatibility and performance with DOS games. Many video cards have sub-par implementations of the VESA standards, or no support at all. UNIVBE replaces the card's built-in support. Many DOS games include a version of UNIVBE because VESA issues were so widespread.
According to SciTech Software Inc, SciTech Display Doctor is licensed by IBM as the native graphics driver solution for OS/2.[1]
[edit] History
The software started out as The Universal VESA TSR (UNIVESA), written by Kendall Bennett. It was renamed to Universal VESA BIOS Extensions (UniVBE) in version 5, which supports VBE/Core 2.0, and no longer a freeware.
In version 5.2, it was renamed to Scitech Display Doctor. However, UniVBE remained to be the name used for the actual driver.
Version 6 included support of VBE/Core 3.0, VBE/SCI.
Version 6.5 introduced the ability to use Scitech Display Doctor as wrapper video driver.
Version 7 supports VESA/MCCS, and included Scitech GLDirect, an OpenGL emulator. This version was also ported to OS/2 and Linux (as version 1.0). However, the proposed product has never been widely available. Only pre-releases are available to public. In the Windows SDD prerelease, it included DOS UniVBE driver 7.20 beta, the Scitech Nucleus Graphics driver, GLDirect 2.0 and 3.0 beta. SDD 7 was first released on OS/2 on 2002-2-28, followed by Windows beta on 2002-3-1.
SciTech Display Doctor 7.1 marked as the final release of SDD, which was available on OS/2. However, the Scitech Nucleus Graphics engine lived on as SciTech SNAP (System Neutral Access Protocol) Graphics, SciTech SNAP DDC, and SciTech VBE Test Suite 8.0.[2] Unlike UniVBE drivers, SciTech SNAP Graphics is designed as fully accelerated binary compatible graphic device driver, rather than patching VESA BIOS.[3]
Display Doctor is no longer supported by SciTech Software, but SciTech Display Doctor 5.3a, SciTech Display Doctor 6.53, and UniVBE 6.7 are available on their ftp site.
[edit] Compatibility
UniVBE requires video card with at least 512 KiB of memory.
Although UniVBE driver has supported many controllers, the quality of VESA support decays in newer incarnations, especially for owners with older hardware. In the case of newer video processors, the video cards that use them begin to incorporate rewritable firmware, which allows video card manufacturers to offer better VBE patches than SciTech can supply, especially for cards using Matrox processors.
UniVBE does not add 16-colour screen modes or text modes, but offers option to reuse those modes with pass through feature. However, text mode pass through feature is broken since SDD 6.
Matrox G-series video cards can only use video modes that utilize at most half of its memory. This is different from the Matrox Millennium, which was documented by SciTech as hardware flaw.
