CONFIGURING VPIC
VPIC must be configured to run correctly with your display board. The
configuration process tells VPIC:
1. The title you want for the menu.
2. What VGA chip you have, so it can use the proper bank switching routine.
3. How much memory you have (in 64K banks).
4. The menu color you want (background:foreground).
5. How to set the various modes you want to use.
If you aren't sure which VGA chip your board uses, you can run WHICHVGA, which
will try to identify your VGA chip and the amount of memory you have. Also check
VGABOARD.DAT for a list of some of the VGA boards each chip was used on. If this
doesn't work, you can remove the display board and look at the label on the
large chip with leads coming out all four sides. Sometimes, you can tell without
removing the board by using DEBUG (or Turbo Debugger, Codeview, or any debugger)
and 'dumping' the contents of display BIOS. To do this, enter DEBUG at the DOS
prompt and you will get a - prompt. Then enter d C000:0 to display the first
part of display BIOS. To dump more of BIOS, juts enter d. You may recognize the
chip manufacturers name here, such as ATI, Trident, Tseng, Paradise, etc. To
exit DEBUG, just enter q.
If WHICHVGA comes back with VESA, that means that your board supports the VESA
standard, which offers a standard interface for VPIC to your SuperVGA display
adapter. It defines the SuperVGA extended modes that your card will do, and has
a standard interface for setting the mode and bank switching, etc. You may have
received a VESA `Terminate and Stay Resident' (TSR) program with your VGA board.
If so, you are encouraged to use it, since it more or less guarantees that VPIC
will work with your display card. The only disadvantage of VESA is concerned
with scrolling the VGA screen, since there is no standard interface for setting
the top of screen beyond 16 bits (line 81 at 800x600x256, line 102 at
640x480x256, or line 204 at 320x200x256). This version of VPIC automatically
reads the VESA info from your display BIOS, and uses the VESA interface. If you
enter VPIC with the /v option, VESA info is ignored and VPIC uses the
configuration file info.
The current VPIC config file VGA chip names and the VGA chip manufacturers are:
VGA Chip Manufacturer/version Comments
=================================================================
AHEADA Ahead ver A Older Ahead cards.
AHEADB Ahead ver B Ahead VGA Wizard/Deluxe.
ATIOLD ATI, 1024x768x16 mode 65h ATI ver 1 chip, VGAWonder
ATINEW ATI, 1024x768x16 mode 55h ATI ver 2 up chip, VGAWonder+
CIRRUS Cirrus CL-GD 500/600 MaxLogic MaxVGA boards NOT SUPPORTED YET
CHIPSTECH Chips & Technology 82C452 Cardinal, Older Boca
EVEREX Original Everex chip
EVBIOS Everex 673, etc Has bank switching built into BIOS
GENOA Genoa (Sim ET 3000) 5300/6300 = 256K, others = 512K
HEADLAND Headland HT-208 Used on VGA-1024i
OAK Oak
PARADISE Paradise Older Paradise cards
TRI88BR Trident TVGA 8800BR Used on older Trident boards, 128K banks.
TRI88CS Trident TVGA 8800CS Used on newer Trident boards (Maxxon, Logix)
TRI89 Trident TVGA 8900 Latest Trident VGA chip, 1M memory avail.
TS3000 Tseng ET 3000 Used on early Genoa, Orchid, others
TS4000 Tseng ET 4000 Recent Orchid, STB, other, 1M memory avail.
TS4000HI Tseng ET 4000 HiColor Does 32K colors to 800x600, 1M memory avail.
WD90C Western Digital WD90C00 Recent Paradise cards, same operation.
VIDEO7 Video 7 Earlier Video 7 boards, BIOS bank switching.
ZYMOS Zymos Poach 51 True Tech HiRes and others.
VESA VESA Standard For boards which have VESA in BIOS.
As new chips become available, they will be added to this list. Run WHICHVGA to
find your VGA chip (works most of the time), and then run CONFIG and find a CFG
file using that VGA chip. Check that the modes agree with the graphics modes in
your manual (16 and 256 color modes only); if they match your card exactly, use
that CFG file by pressing ENTER. If not, copy the closest file to a new filename
with extension CFG and change the modes to agree with your manual. Make the
title and menu color whatever you like (see CONFIGURATION FILE FORMAT). Then
rerun CONFIG, pick that file, and press ENTER to configure VPIC. There are
numerous configuration files which come with VPIC, but there are so many boards
out there that I can't list all of them.
MENU CONFIGURATION
To configure VPIC, make sure that VPIC, CVPIC, CONFIG, and all the .CFG files
are in the current directory. By running the CONFIG program, VPIC can be
configured from a menu. CONFIG lists all the configuration files (with a .cfg
extension) in the current directory, and shows you the contents of each as you
move around the list using the cursor keys. ESCape aborts the CONFIG program
without changing VPIC, and ENTER configures VPIC for the highlighted file.
Pressing a letter key jumps to next filename starting with that letter (or
number).
MANUAL CONFIGURATION
You can use CVPIC to configure VPIC manually by entering
CVPIC config_file[.ext]
where the default extension is .cfg.
CONFIGURATION FILE (.CFG) FORMAT
CVPIC ignores leading spaces and blank lines in the file, and all characters
after a semicolon are considered comments and ignored. The .CFG file contains
the following lines, which can be up to 150 characters in length each:
1. Board name, which will appear in the VPIC menu. This is user defineable,
and could be something like 'Joe's VGA Board'.
2. VGA CHIP should be one of the names supported by VPIC; see above. Upper
or lower case is OK.
3. The number of 64K banks of display ram usable for pictures (1 for
standard VGA (no extended modes), 4 for 256K, 8 for 512K, 16 for 1M).
4. Menu text color. A number whose value is (background*16 + foreground).
The allowable background colors are 0 thru 7, and the allowable
foreground colors are 0 thru 15. This number is easiest to figure if
entered in hex (prefixed by 0x); then the 1st digit is the background
color (0-7) and the 2nd digit is the foreground color (0-F). The digits
correspond to black (0), blue (1), green (2), aqua (3), red (4),
violet (5), brown (6), and white (7), and the digits 8-F are intensified
versions of the 0-7. For example, 0x3E would tell VPIC to use bright
yellow text on an aqua background. CONFIG gives the value in hex, and the
corresponding foreground-background colors.
5 thru n. The following lines describe the modes supported by the board.
Each line is of the form: F1 F2 AX BX CX DX W H C G P where:
* F1 = VGA (256 color) mode flag.
* F2 = 256K colors to choose from flag (as in mode 12h, 640x480x16 or
any 256 color mode).
* AX,BX,CX,DX register values used to set this mode. Preceeding the
numbers by 0x indicates hex; ie., 0x10 = 16.
* W, H, C are width, height, colors in this mode.
VESA.CFG ONLY
* G is the VESA Granularity in Kilobytes; you only need to specify this
if WHICHVGA returned VESA and a Granularity of less than 64K for a
mode; ie, if the Granularity for a mode was 4K, use 4 for this field.
* P is the number of color planes; usually 1 for 256 color modes and 4
for 16 color modes. However, the ATI in 1024x768x16 uses 1 plane and
2 pixels/byte.
All the VGA (256 color) modes should be grouped first, followed by the EGA
(16 color) modes.