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FreeBE/AF - the free VBE/AF driver project
Version 1.2
"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to
choose from."
Click here to download the binary
distribution
(246k)
Or here to download the source code
(235k)
Introduction
VBE/AF is a low level driver interface for accessing graphics hardware.
It provides all the same features as VESA 3.0 (access to linear
framebuffer video memory, high speed protected mode bank switching, page
flipping, hardware scrolling, etc), and adds the ability to use 2D
hardware acceleration in an efficient and portable manner. An /AF driver
is provided as a disk file (vbeaf.drv), and contains clean 32 bit machine
code which can be called directly by a C program. If implemented
correctly, these drivers have the potential to be binary portable across
multiple operating systems, so the same driver file can be used from DOS,
Windows, Linux, etc.
FreeBE/AF is an attempt to implement free VBE/AF drivers on as many cards
as possible. This idea came about on the Allegro mailing list, due to the
need for a dynamically loadable driver structure that could support
hardware acceleration. VBE/AF seemed to fit the bill, and Allegro already
had support for the SciTech drivers, so it seemed like a good idea to
adopt this format for ourselves. The primary goal is to make these
drivers work with Allegro, so the emphasis will be on implementing the
functions that Allegro actually uses, but we encourage other developers
to join us in taking advantage of this excellent driver architecture.
This project currently provides fully accelerated drivers for a handful
of chipsets, plus a number of dumb framebuffer implementations based on
the video drivers from older versions of the Allegro library. It has also
defined a few extensions to the stock VBE/AF API, which allow Allegro
programs to use these drivers in a true protected mode environment
without having to resort to the nearptr hack, and provide a number of
hook functions that will be needed to remain compatible with future
generations of the SciTech drivers.
The current status of the VBE/AF standard is somewhat confused. It was
designed by SciTech Software (http://www.scitechsoft.com/), who provide
commercial VBE/AF drivers for a wide range of cards as part of their
Display Doctor package. It was originally going to be released as a VESA
standard, but the VESA people seriously messed this up by charging
exorbitant sums of $$$ for copies of the spec. As a result, very few
people bothered to support these drivers, and the FreeBE/AF project was
only made possible by the information available in the SciTech MGL
library source code, and the helpfulness of Kendall Bennett (the designer
of the spec) himself. Unfortunately SciTech have now abandoned VBE/AF
themselves, replacing it with an equivalent but non-public API called
Nucleus, which is only available under NDA. SciTech will continue to
provide VBE/AF drivers for the cards which they already support, but
will not adding any new ones in the future, so this project is now the
only active source of VBE/AF driver implementations.
At present, the Allegro (http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro/) and MGL
(http://www.scitechsoft.com) libraries are the only major packages which
can take advantage of accelerated VBE/AF drivers. As such, this project
is starting to look more like a implementation of video drivers
specifically for the Allegro library, rather than a potential
industry-wide standard :-) But it doesn't have to be this way! VBE/AF is
technically an excellent design: efficient, easy to write and use, and
highly portable. If you are writing graphics code, and getting frustrated
by the many limitiations imposed by VESA, why not think about using
VBE/AF instead? Even better, if you have a card that our project doesn't
yet support, why not add a new driver for it? This can be a lot of fun,
and we would be delighted to offer any help or advice that you might need.
Usage
Each driver is located in a different subdirectory. Run "make" to compile
them, choose the one you want, copy the vbeaf.drv file from this
directory to c:\, and you are ready to go!
The stub directory contains a generic non-accelerated VBE/AF driver. This
is not useful in any way, because it simply sits on top of your existing
VESA driver and emulates a few "hardware" drawing operations with very
slow software implementations. The stub is intended as a starting point
for people who want to make drivers for a specific card, and should not
be used directly.
To recompile FreeBE/AF, you need a working copy of djgpp. Run "make" to
build all the available drivers, or "make dir/vbeaf.drv" to compile a
specific driver (replacing {dir} with the directory name, eg. "make
stub/vbeaf.drv"). To build the install.exe program for a binary
distribution, run "make all" (this requires you to have the Allegro
library installed, and the allegro/tools/ directory in your path). This
documentation is converted from the custom ._tx format into ASCII and
HTML by the Allegro makedoc program: run "make docs" to do this, after
putting the makedoc utility somewhere in your path.
FreeBE/AF only supports the VBE/AF 2.0 API. It is not backward compatible
with the assembler VBE/AF 1.0 interface, and programs that try to use
those obsolete functions will not work correctly.
Supported Hardware
Not all VBE/AF drivers provide the complete set of possible features.
Some may be written in a 100% clean and portable manner, allowing them to
be used on any platform, but others make use of the video BIOS in order
to set the initial video mode: this makes them a lot easier to write, but
means that it can only be used under DOS. Some of the drivers, in
particular the ones based on the old Allegro library chipset support,
don't support any hardware accelerated drawing at all: these are still
usefull because they provide high speed protected mode bank switching and
can work around the bugs in some manufacturer's VESA implementations, but
are obviously not nearly as cool as a fully accelerated driver.
This table lists the currently available FreeBE/AF drivers, and what
features they each provide:
ATI 18800/28800
Uses BIOS
Banked modes only
Supports farptr extension
Dumb framebuffer
ATI mach64
Uses BIOS
Banked and linear modes
No FreeBE/AF extensions
Hardware accelerated
Avance Logic ALG-2101, ALG-2201, ALG-2228, ALG-2301, ALG-2302
Uses BIOS
Banked modes only
No FreeBE/AF extensions
Dumb framebuffer
Cirrus 54xx (not 546x). Should be ok with 5426, 5428, 7541, 7543
Uses BIOS
Banked and linear modes
No FreeBE/AF extensions
Hardware accelerated
Matrox Millenium, Mystique, Millenium II
Uses BIOS
Banked and linear modes
Supports farptr and config extensions
Hardware accelerated
NVidia Riva 128, TNT. Conflicts with Windows!
100% portable
Banked and linear modes
Supports config extension
Hardware accelerated
Paradise
Uses BIOS
Banked modes only
Supports farptr extension
Dumb framebuffer
S3
Uses BIOS
Banked modes only
Supports farptr extension
Hardware accelerated
Trident TGUI 9440. Doesn't work under Windows!
100% portable
Banked and linear modes
No FreeBE/AF extensions
Hardware accelerated
Trident
Uses BIOS
Banked modes only
Supports farptr extension
Dumb framebuffer
Tseng ET3000/ET4000/ET6000
Uses BIOS
Banked modes only
Supports farptr extension
Dumb framebuffer
Video-7
Uses BIOS
Banked modes only
Supports farptr extension
Dumb framebuffer
stub driver (for testing and development purposes only)
Uses BIOS
Banked and linear modes
Supports farptr and config extensions
Slow software emulation of hardware drawing functions
Contributing
If you want to add a new driver, follow these steps:
md cardname
copy stub\*.* cardname
edit makefile
{ add a new entry to the DRIVERS variable at the top of the file }
cd cardname
edit drvhdr.c
{ replace "stub driver implementation" with your driver name }
edit driver.c
{ fill in the blanks, replacing the VESA calls with chipset-specific }
{ code, and fleshing out the accelerated drawing functions }
edit notes.txt
{ describe anything interesting about your driver, most importantly }
{ listing what drawing functions it supports in hardware }
cd..
done!
The makefile requires each driver to provide a drvhdr.c file, which will
be linked into the drvgen.exe utility and used to generate the VBE/AF
header. You must also provide a notes.txt, which will be displayed by the
installation program, but everything else is entirely up to you. Any C
source files placed into your driver directory will automatically be
compiled and linked into the driver binary, so you can organise your code
in whatever style you prefer.
Because the VBE/AF drivers are output as relocatable binary modules, they
cannot use any C library functions. There are a few utility functions in
helper.c, but these will not work on any platforms other than DOS+DPMI,
so it would be better to avoid using them if you can manage without.
A great deal of hardware information can be found in the VGADOC package
(ftp://x2ftp.oulu.fi/pub/msdos/programming/docs/vgadoc4b.zip) and the
XFree86 sources (http://www.xfree86.org/). If this isn't enough, try
asking the manufacturer for more details.
Files
freebe.txt - ASCII format documentation
freebe.html - HTML format documentation
freebe._tx - custom format documentation source file
makefile - script for building the drivers
vbeaf.h - VBE/AF structures and constants
start.s - driver relocation code
helper.c - debugging trace printf() and VESA helper routines
drvgen.c - modified version of DXEGEN, for building vbeaf.drv
drv.ld - linker script
install.c - installation program for binary distributions
stub/vbeaf.drv - example driver, using VESA to access the hardware
stub/driver.c - main implementation file for the example driver
stub/drvhdr.c - VBE/AF header structure for the example driver
stub/notes.txt - more information about the example driver
ati/ - ATI 18800/28800 driver, based on old Allegro code
avance/ - Avance Logic driver, by George Foot
cirrus54/ - Cirrus 54x driver, by Michal Mertl
mach64/ - ATI mach64 driver, by Ove Kaaven
matrox/ - Matrox driver, by Shawn Hargreaves
nvidia/ - NVidia driver, by Shawn Hargreaves
paradise/ - Paradise driver, based on old Allegro code
s3/ - S3 driver, by Michal Stencl
tgui/ - Trident TGUI 9440 driver, by Salvador Eduardo Tropea
trident/ - Trident driver, based on old Allegro code
tseng/ - Tseng driver, based on old Allegro code
video7/ - Video-7 driver, based on old Allegro code
Copyright
As the name implies, FreeBE/AF is free. Both the driver binaries and
sources may be distributed and modified without restriction. If you find
any of this stuff useful, the best way to repay us is by writing a new
driver for a card that isn't currently supported.
Disclaimer: no warranty is provided with this software. We are not to be
held liable if it fries your monitor, eats your graphics card, or roasts
your motherboard.
Credits
The DRVGEN utility is based on the djgpp DXEGEN system, by Charles
Sandmann (sandmann@clio.rice.edu) and DJ Delorie (dj@delorie.com).
Linking/relocation system and ATI mach64 driver by Ove Kaaven
(ovek@arcticnet.no).
VBE/AF framework, stub driver, Matrox driver, NVidia driver, most of the
old Allegro chipset drivers, conversion from Allegro to VBE/AF format,
and installation program by Shawn Hargreaves (shawn@talula.demon.co.uk).
Cirrus 54x driver by Michal Mertl (mime@eunet.cz).
Trident TGUI 9440 driver by Salvador Eduardo Tropea (set-soft@usa.net).
Avance Logic driver by George Foot (george.foot@merton.oxford.ac.uk).
Fixes to the Cirrus 5446 MMIO routines by Keir Fraser (kaf24@cam.ac.uk).
Tseng ET6000 support by Ben Chauveau (bendomc@worldnet.fr).
Paradise driver by Francois Charton (deef@pobox.oleane.com).
Tseng ET4000 15/24 bit support by Marco Campinoti (marco@etruscan.li.it).
Trident driver improved by Mark Habersack (grendel@ananke.amu.edu.pl).
Video-7 fixes by Markus Oberhumer (markus.oberhumer@jk.uni-linz.ac.at).
S3 driver improved by Michael Bukin (M.A.Bukin@inp.nsk.su).
Video-7 driver by Peter Monks (Peter_Monks@australia.notes.pw.com).
S3 hardware acceleration by Michal Stencl (stenclpmd@ba.telecom.sk).
Website logo by Colin Walsh (cwalsh@nf.sympatico.ca).
More graphics hardware support by [insert your name here] :-)
VBE/AF itself is the brainchild of SciTech software, and in particular
Kendall Bennett (KendallB@scitechsoft.com).
The Video Electronics Standards Association does _not_ deserve any
mention here. The absurd prices they charge for copies of the /AF
specification have prevented it from being widely supported, and I think
this is a great pity. Long live freedom!
History
30 March, 1998 - v0.1.
First public release, containing an example driver implementation that
runs on top of VESA.
31 March, 1998 - v0.11.
Added support for multi-buffered modes.
5 April, 1998 - v0.2.
Added an accelerated Matrox driver.
8 April, 1998 - v0.3.
Added accelerated drivers for ATI mach64 and Cirrus 54x cards, plus
minor updates to the Matrox driver.
12 April, 1998 - v0.4.
Proper installation program, more drawing functions implemented by the
stub and Matrox drivers, improved ATI driver, compiled with PGCC for a
5% speed boost.
26 April, 1998 - v0.5.
More accelerated features in the Cirrus and ATI drivers. Fixed bugs in
the Matrox driver. Added an option to disable hardware emulation in
the stub driver, which produces a non-accelerated, dumb framebuffer
implementation. The init code will now politely fail any programs that
try to use VBE/AF 1.0 functions, rather than just crashing.
10 June, 1998 - v0.6.
Fixed scrolling problem on Millenium cards.
1 November, 1998 - v0.7.
Added drivers for Trident TGUI 9440 and Avance Logic cards, and
improved the build process.
14 December, 1998 - v0.8.
Bugfixes to the Matrox Millenium II and Cirrus drivers. Converted all
the old Allegro library chipset drivers into non-accelerated VBE/AF
format, adding support for ATI 18800/28800, Paradise, S3, Trident,
Tseng ET3000/ET4000/ET6000, and Video-7 boards. Designed and
implemented an API extension mechanism, providing the ability to use
these drivers in a true protected mode environment, a more rational
relocation scheme, and various hooks that will later be needed for
supporting the SciTech Nucleus drivers.
20 December, 1998 - v0.9.
Bugfixes. Added a config mechanism, allowing the install program to
optionally disable some features of a driver.
3 January, 1999 - v1.0
Bugfixes.
27 March, 1999 - v1.1
Added acceleration support to the S3 driver, plus some bugfixes.
27 June, 1999 - v1.2
Added driver for NVidia cards. Improved the PCI bus scanning code to
know about bridges to secondary devices (so it can locate AGP cards).
Minor bugfix to the Mach64 driver (it was using the wrong clip rect
for scrolling displays). Minor bugfix to the Matrox driver (it was
setting the wrong background color for the hardware cursor).
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