Hi all, I'm putting together a new OS4.2 (patch 4) system using a Compaq DeskPro P-III system with the 440BX chipset. I was wondering what the highest resolution the built-in VBE driver can handle in 32-bit colour mode would be. Would 1920x1200 be feasible? The ATI Radeon 9800 Pro card I'll use will have plenty of VRAM, like 128 MB. If this doesn't work, I do have a fully-supported Matrox 8 MB card as a fallback, but I'd like to use the ATI card to be able to play some retro 3D games after rebooting to Win98.
Thanks
I have an ATI 3D RAGE LT PRO 8MB that I run at 1600 x 1200, but I don't see any ATI drivers that support 1900x1200.
For the Matrox at this link
https://soosun.tistory.com/240 (
https://soosun.tistory.com/240), the supprt goes up to 2048x1280.
Thanks, I'm going to try the VBE driver with the Radeon 9800 Pro and see what resolutions it can offer. I know the card supports VESA in its BIOS, I remember using it back in the day, but I had a 17" 1024x768 LCD monitor back then which was pretty high end in those days. If 1920x1200 isn't possible with the VESA driver, I'll fall back to the Matrox card.
I'd much rather use the ATI card for its 3D capabilities when booted into Windows 98, but not if it won't display at full monitor resolution under OPENSTEP.
I'm just waiting on some final components to be delivered before I can finalise this Vintage PC build and test the graphics.
EDIT: It's up and running now with the Matrox G200 card which has 8 MB VRAM. The MGA driver recognises it but then kernel panics. I switched to using the VESA VBE driver with the same card and it works great, max resolution offered is 1600x1200 at 16-bit colour, but that's good enough for me.
Just to close this topic off, I've now swapped the 8 MB Matrox G200 card with a 32 MB G400 card and it works great with the MGA driver, high res in 32-bit colour is looking sharp. The kernel panics were caused when the OmniFastVideo driver was enabled, it seems the Matrox MGA driver isn't compatible with Omni's driver. The choice is between OmniFastVideo + VESA VBE driver combo or just the Matrox driver on its own. Performance is great either way, dragging windows around feels 'slippery'. The G400 card doesn't seem to be compatible with NeXT's VESA VBE driver whereas the G200 is.