Velocity9x 0.3

Engineering bring-up driver — not a release driver. Developed and tested almost entirely under 86Box. Install it only on a virtual machine you have backed up cold, or on hardware you are willing to recover by hand. Read docs/INSTALL.md first, and always keep a standard-VGA fallback.

Highlights

• S3 Trio32/64 86C764 (5333:8811) target — strict INF matching, Trio-aware PCI discovery and hardware reporting. Live 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 switching plus GDI validation at 8 and 16 bpp, with palette validation at 8 bpp. Includes a DirectDraw framebuffer HAL with video-memory surfaces, CRTC page flips and bounded 8/16-bpp hardware solid fills; Direct3D stays intentionally disabled on this non-ViRGE target.
• ARGB4444 Direct3D textures (ViRGE) — the texture unit selects its format from bits 7:5 of the command register, so 4444 and 1555 are both native and need no conversion. Only 1555 was published previously.
• 640x400x8 (VBE 100h) published in the mode table and INF as a GDI desktop mode.
• Velocity9x Display Properties page registered and verified on the Trio64 target — adapter, mode, framebuffer, clock, build and last-test reporting.
• Better failure evidence — the DirectDraw HAL now flushes its callback ring to C:\V9XTRACE.INI on an unhandled fault or bounded ViRGE engine timeout, and the trace distinguishes a blit the driver executed from one it declined.

Full detail in CHANGELOG.md.

Asset

Velocity9x-0.3.zip is the built offline transfer package (VIRGE\ and TRIO64\ trees, plus README.TXT and RECOVER.TXT at the root). Each package carries a SHA256.TXT so you can confirm nothing was corrupted in transit. Windows 98 has no built-in extractor — unzip on the host and copy the tree to the target machine.

VGA hardware survey (V9XSURV) — build d746481

This is not the driver. If you have a supported S3 card, you want the v0.3 driver release instead.

V9XSURV.EXE is a real-mode DOS tool for owners of cards Velocity9x does not support. It collects what writing a chipset backend requires: PCI identifiers and full configuration space, the video BIOS, the VBE mode list, your monitor's EDID, and the raw VGA register file. Run it, send back the report, and the card becomes something that can actually be worked on.

It is versioned separately from the driver on purpose — the tool moves at its own pace and is not tied to a driver version.

Running it

Boot to real DOS for the best result — in Windows 98: Start → Shut Down → Restart in MS-DOS mode, or boot a DOS floppy. Then:

V9XSURV

Answer the one question it asks, and send back the file it names at the end — normally C:\V9XSURV.INI. A DOS box inside Windows also works and still produces a useful report; it just cannot see as much.

Useful switches:

Switch	Effect
/rom	also dump the complete video BIOS image — several times larger, but the best way to identify an unusual card. Please use it if asked.
/tier2 / /notier2	answer the question up front instead of being prompted
/out:A:\V9XSURV.INI	write the report elsewhere, e.g. a floppy on a machine with no spare disk
/?	list the options

What it touches

It reads. It does not change your video mode, install anything, or leave anything behind on the card. The only file it creates is the report.

The one exception is the opt-in vendor probe it asks about partway through: it writes the documented unlock keys for your chipset family, reads the registers behind them, and restores the originals. That is where video memory size, clock settings and aperture layout come from, so say yes if you can. It is dispatched on PCI vendor ID, so an unfamiliar card is never poked speculatively — currently S3 (5333) and Cirrus Logic (1013); every other vendor gets a section explaining why there is no probe. If Windows is running, the tool will recommend declining — take its advice. Declining is fine either way: the main report is closed on disk before the question is asked, so you lose only that section.

If the machine stops responding, power-cycle it — nothing the survey does survives a reboot. Then re-run with /notier2 and send that report along with a note saying which card is fitted. Knowing which card wedged the vendor probe is itself useful.

Privacy

The report is plain text — open it in any editor and read it before you send it. It holds hardware identifiers and register values only: no filenames, no machine serial numbers, no personal information. The one identifier belonging to a physical object is your monitor's EDID, which carries the monitor's model and its factory serial number. Delete the [EDID] section if you would rather not share it; everything else still parses.

Verifying the download

SHA256  A531DF920F0F23BD7A6AB0F6E3DA8E29D2594957D3495C43E8A559EE7347BF05  V9XSURV.EXE

Built from d746481 with Open Watcom via scripts/build-vga-survey.ps1, from tools/diag/vga_survey_dos.c. The build fails if the PCI write functions (B10Bh/B10Ch/B10Dh), VBE set-mode (4F02h) or the VBE OEM extension (4F14h) ever appear in the source, so the query-only guarantee is enforced at build time rather than by review.

The report format, safety tiers and per-vendor probe support are specified in docs/specifications/vga-survey.md. Reports are decoded host-side by scripts/parse-vga-survey.ps1.