Hi,

I hope that you all don't consider this question too dumb.

If I were to take your basic modern day PC motherboard, with an embedded graphics controller, and load the venerable MSDOS 6.2.2, would I still have the option of sticking an upgraded graphics card into the PCI slot? I am not sure at all of how the process of finding the BIOS drivers for the graphics card would work under DOS as opposed to one of the more modern operating systems.

Thank You
tom_cip_11551 (AT) hotmail (DOT) com

Tom

to be honest: I have never tried this, but I guess: yes. The adressing of
the AGP slot is handled by the BIOS of your mainboard, so all DOS has to do
is calling the appropriate routine in BIOS to reach the card. And those
adresses are more or less standard.
What I can't tell is you will be able to adress the new board to its full
capabilities. I think there is a good chance that you will be limited to the
graphic resolutons DOS can handle, that means standard VGA and SVGA
resolutions.
Besides: graphic programs under DOS are limited to SVGA in the best of cases
anyway...

If graphic adressing wasn't depending on BIOS, I'd never be able to adress
my PCI-graphic board from MS-DOS too, and that still works, so....

The VESA standard was developed to deal with graphics cards under DOS. These
days current cards support the standard as a startup/fallback point to give
users a workable machine to load video drivers. (This is what using Safe Mode
does on a Windows PC--falls back to using basic, unenhanced modes on all
hardware.) You should be able to use all of the modes.

Doug Frost

"Teece" <tom cip 11551 (AT) nospamatall (DOT) hotmail.com> wrote


My system has AGP video board, and I have been using it with a number
of operating systems. Whenever I boot from MS-DOS 5.1, the system is
working fine, without any problems whatsoever. Windows 3.1 also
functions smoothly.