Brand new open source VESA BIOS test program.

[joncampbell123]

The Scitech test program from 1994 seems to be a product of it's time. Some of the tests begin to break down and stop working if the video card has more than 8MB of RAM.

Note that in 1994, most video cards had 512KB to 4MB of RAM. Cards with 8MB didn't come out until at least 1995-1996. So of course, the developer of that tool has no way to test how it handles higher amounts of video memory.

Not only will this new tool correctly handle cards with 256KB of video RAM up to 128MB, it will correctly handle video resolutions and all pixel formats seen and also reported by DOSBox-X VBE. Ideally it should even work with recent PCIe SVGA cards that still support MBR boot and VBE extensions with possibly 256MB, 512MB or even 1GB of video RAM.

Make sure it's licensed so that others can improve it and use it. Perhaps FreeDOS would appreciate such a testing tool.

[joncampbell123]

While most of the test and dev will be done against DOSBox-X, DOSBox SVN, DOSBox Staging, etc. testing should also be done against any real hardware on hand. That includes video cards that have the VBE built into the BIOS as well as older SVGA cards that need an MS-DOS TSR to add VBE extensions (i.e. Tseng Labs, Paradise, etc.).

Any help is appreciated, including results from your stash of 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s VESA BIOS compatible hardware.