Display Drivers

[James [Wez] Weatherall]

On Mon, 20 Apr 1998, Stephen Hardman wrote:

> I sent a couple of messages to the list which received no replies
> about a month ago about a problem that I have now fixed (or more
> likely, come to the realisation about what the problem was). 

Oh dear. Sorry about that.

> Anyway... I found Scitech Display Doctor after someone else asked
> me about my antiquated win 3.11 drivers, I had no idea, so I found
> it and installed, the only driver in the world with support for
> the UMC chipset probably :).  This solved everything and doubled
> the apparent abilities of the video card from the old drivers too.

Excellent.  Other people seem to have had similar problems, with
connections to WinVNC just immediately quitting or producing garbled
output.  It's probable that misconfigured or out of date video drivers are
to blame to some extent.

> Perhaps the Win VNC server could do a check that it can access
> the required hooks from the driver before continuing?

I did actually try this at one point, using the GetDeviceCaps function to
decide whether BitBlt and GetDIBits were supported.  Unfortunately, on my
Windows NT box, which works fine with WinVNC, both checks returned a
'not supported' result, which seemed wrong!

> Or perhaps it was another, but related, problem to do with the
> driver?

Windows 3.11 drivers are generally a bad idea to use with Windows 95, if
only because they're 16-bit, so they'll slow your system down
significantly.

Thanks for the 'trivia'!

James "Wez" Weatherall
--
Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory, Cambridge, UK.
Tel : Work - 343000