Need help with ET4000W32P and IBM8514 compatibility

[Baer]

I am currently struggling with setting up an ATI Mach32 PCI with a Pentium III motherboard. I need IBM 8514 compatibility for a certain DOS program.

Now should my attempts with the Mach32 fail, a last ditch effort would be the ET4000 because that certain DOS program can be setup to either access the hardware directly or to use IBM's adapter interface API. I remember that the original ET4000 (ISA bus) back in the days came with 2 DOS TSRs, RIXAI4.EXE and RIXAI8.EXE to emulate that IBM adapter interface.

Question: does the ET4000W32P still support these emulator programs? Can anybody confirm that? The ET4000W32P is my only other option since that Pentium III motherboard has only PCI slots.

Thanks for any information on that matter,
Markus

 

[Xacalite]

I only tried the AI emulation with ET4000/W32i, and it did work, but with some minor issues - I tested it with BP 7.0 BGIDEMO, and some of the screens exhibited artifacts, like bad clipping.

 

[Baer]

I only tried the AI emulation with ET4000/W32i, and it did work, but with some minor issues - I tested it with BP 7.0 BGIDEMO, and some of the screens exhibited artifacts, like bad clipping.

Thank you for this information, that's good to know. I will try that BGIDEMO in DOSBox with virtual ET4000 and RIXAI8.EXE emulator - if artifacts appear, they might have their root cause in BGIDEMO because the DOS application I am interested in seems to perform without any problems in that environment. So if all goes well, I might spend some $$ and get a good ET4000W32p. But I'm also still trying to find answers to my Mach32 problem ( http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?66216 ).

Markus.

 

[Xacalite]

Just tried BGIDEMO with DOSBox machine=svga_et4000 and RIXAI, and all the arifacts I saw on a real ET4000/W32i are visible as well, see the attached picture:


Can anybody try BGIDEMO on a real 8514/A and/or XGA?

Anyway, this thread - https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=16789 suggests that there's some RIXAI version for chipsets other than ET4000, but where can it be found?

It should be noted that RIXAI for ET4000 was originally distributed with cards based on ET4000AX, ie. non-accelerated, which means that RIXAI doesn't rely on hardware acceleration, and should be easily portable to any SVGA chipset.

 

[Baer]

Thanks for conducting the test ... looks like there is a bug in Borlands BGI8514 library. Mahjongg for DOS and 8514/a was written using the exact same graphics library which seems to have a bug in its internal routines for filling polygons (the 8514/a did not supply functions to fill polygons!). Years later somebody came up with a patch. Look here: https://www.classicdosgames.com/game/Mah_Jongg_-8514-.html

So this might really be a problem of the BGI8514 graphics library. I also thought about how easy it might be to port RIXAI*.EXE to any other SVGA board ... but Tseng never released the source code AFAIK. And I've searched the internet up and down for another 8514/a emulator and could not find anything.

Markus.