It's good to see that the latest GPUs can still be used in "dumb framebuffer" mode, are mostly VGA-compatible, and have VESA VBE support. I suspect AMD / NVIDIA might still have some sort of DOS-based factory tooling when bringing up new GPUs for the first time. In sadder news, I've read that the latest Intel integrated GPUs no longer have a VBIOS and are UEFI-only; although it might only be a matter of time before someone vibe-codes (vibe-ports?) one based on those from an older model.
BIOS support has indeed been dropped from modern video cards. I was hoping something like https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap might work, but the README says that MS-DOS games don't work under that.
That has a very generic VBIOS which would probably work on an original IBM VGA, but the problem is that each GPU needs a specific VBIOS to switch it between VGA and hi-res modes by writing vendor-specific registers. VBIOS is effectively a driver, so given the necessary documentation or existing OSS driver source it should be possible to write a suitable one even for GPUs that are UEFI-only.
> The NVIDIA GeForce 1050 GTX has some issues with windowed DOS prompts, and presumably newer NVIDIA hardware has the same problem. The issues include potential freezes when using the mode command to change the size of the prompt, and font corruption when switching to full screen (which also affects blue screens).
Someone with connections to NVIDIA support should really file a bug about this!
19 comments
It's good to see that the latest GPUs can still be used in "dumb framebuffer" mode, are mostly VGA-compatible, and have VESA VBE support. I suspect AMD / NVIDIA might still have some sort of DOS-based factory tooling when bringing up new GPUs for the first time. In sadder news, I've read that the latest Intel integrated GPUs no longer have a VBIOS and are UEFI-only; although it might only be a matter of time before someone vibe-codes (vibe-ports?) one based on those from an older model.
> Running Windows 3.1 in True Color Full HD
People from the time would be astonished by the hardware we have now yet bloated software globs up every ounce of performance. What a waste!
Someone with connections to NVIDIA support should really file a bug about this!