GRaphics Adapter Device Drivers (GRADD)

SciTech Display Doctor for OS/2 Version 7.1.3, build 343 ATI Special Edition SCITECH DISPLAY DOCTOR/se GRADD DEVICE DRIVERS Copyright (C) 1991-2002 SciTech Software, Inc. All rights reserved. CONTENTS..................................................... INTRODUCTION Graphics Adapter Device Drivers (GRADD) Drivers Included About SciTech Display Doctor For OS/2 About The ATI Special Edition List of all supported chips Supported Resolutions Compatibility Functional Restrictions INSTALLATION Extraction Preliminary Steps Setting Your Display To VGA Mode Attended Installation Installation in a CID Environment ADVANCED OPTIONS GAMon Monitor Selection Program Restoring your system in case of failure Removing SciTech Display Doctor/se GAReport Hardware Report Program GACtrl Configuration Program GAOption Options Selection Program MISCELLANEOUS TIPS FixPak-Specific Problems Relocating the Nucleus drivers Switching between Screen Pages SUPPORT ............................................................. INTRODUCTION................................................. GRAPHICS ADAPTER DEVICE DRIVERS (GRADD) _______________________________________ GRADD is an IBM OS/2 device driver architecture that makes it easier to support new graphics hardware as it becomes available. Enhanced PM applications performance can be realized when using accelerated GRADD drivers. The GRADD device drivers provide seamless support for accelerated and unaccelerated display graphics and advanced color depth and resolutions. They conform to the OS/2 32-bit flat memory model and are designed to function as 32-bit Presentation Manager graphics display drivers under the OS/2 32-bit graphics engine. Several new and updated GRADD drivers are contained in this package, including the SciTech Display Doctor/se GRADD. DRIVERS INCLUDED ________________ The following accelerated GRADD drivers is included: * SciTech Display Doctor GRADD (SDDGRADD) Which provides support for the licensed ATI graphics adapters listed below. SciTech Display Doctor/se automatically detects your graphics adapter each time during boot up. Also included are IBM generic VGA and SVGA support. * Video Graphics Array GRADD (VGAGRADD) * Generic VESA Unaccelerated GRADD (GENGRADD) These additional drivers are provided as backup drivers or for comparison, in case you encounter problems with the SciTech Display Doctor/se GRADD. GENGRADD may provide UNACCELERATED support for display graphics at enhanced resolutions and color depths. GENGRADD will work with most adapters that include a VESA compliant BIOS; and the performance, which will vary depending on system configuration, will not be as good as an accelerated driver. ABOUT SCITECH DISPLAY DOCTOR FOR OS/2 _____________________________________ SciTech Display Doctor/se for OS/2 brings SciTech's proven universal device driver technologies to the OS/2 operating system. SciTech Display Doctor for OS/2 incorporates the SciTech Nucleus Graphics Architecture, which is a cross platform device driver technology enabling the use of the same device drivers in all versions of SciTech Display Doctor. Sharing the drivers between platforms improves the quality and performance of device drivers for all supported operating systems. ABOUT THE ATI SPECIAL EDITION _____________________________ The ATI Special Edition of SciTech Display Doctor is a version that ATI has licensed on behalf of its OS/2 customers. The Special Edition contains a subset of the features in the full product, as outlined below: . Resolutions of 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1600x1200 . Support for all color depths . Refresh rates from 60Hz to 85Hz . DDC Plug and Play monitor detection . Full hardware 2D acceleration . Hardware cursor SciTech SNAP Graphics for OS/2 has additional features and is available from SciTech's web site (http://www.scitechsoft.com/). LIST OF ALL SUPPORTED CHIPS ____________________________ This is a list of the various graphics adapters that this version of SciTech Display Doctor supports. This list refers to the actual chips being used, not board-level implementations. . ATI Radeon 7000/VE, Radeon 9000 Pro, Mobility Radeon, Mobility Radeon 7500 . ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 . IBM VGA Compatible SUPPORTED RESOLUTIONS _____________________ Supported resolutions, color depths and refresh rates are adapter dependent and will vary depending on the amount of graphics memory and the limitations of the graphics adapter hardware. COMPATIBILITY _____________ These graphics device drivers are currently compatible with: All versions of OS/2 3.0 with fixpak level 35 or later All versions of OS/2 4.0 with fixpak level 5 or later All versions of OS/2 Warp Server for e-business All versions of OS/2 Convenience Pak (MCP and ACP) The SETUP installation command rejects installations on unacceptable OS/2 versions or fixpak levels. Also, after installing these graphics drivers, if you later wish to uninstall any required Fixpak to a Fixpak level before Fixpak 5 (OS/2 4.0) or Fixpak 35 (OS/2 3.0), you should first restore your computer to VGA to remove the SciTech Display Doctor/se GRADD drivers. Other than the use of English messages, the SBCS drivers installed for SBCS languages not in the SET LANG= list in the section entitled "Extraction" above are correctly functional for the chosen language. FUNCTIONAL RESTRICTIONS _______________________ Current known restrictions include the following: 1) The SciTech Display Doctor/se GRADD drivers, do *NOT* require a chipset specific SVGADATA.PMI file, but instead have a single PMI file implemented via a DLL. Hence when running SDDGRADD do *NOT* use the SVGA ON INIT command to create an SVGADATA.PMI file. 2) If you enable the HPFS386 Local Security feature, you must make sure that: - The x:\os2\drivers\nucleus directory is always readable. - The x:\os2\drivers\nucleus\config subtree has read/write/create access for all users. Where "x:" is your OS/2 boot drive. Failure to do this will cause your system to not boot properly unless the administrator is logged on. INSTALLATION......................................................... PRELIMINARY STEPS _________________ The following steps prepare your computer before installing the SciTech Display Doctor/se GRADD device drivers: 1. Other applications, particularly WIN-OS/2 applications, should be closed so that the device driver installation can replace the driver files which an open application might have locked as read only. 2. If you previously installed an SVGA driver, return to VGA resolution using the procedures in the section of this README entitled "Setting Your Display to VGA Mode". EXTRACTION __________ To set up the SciTech Display Doctor 7.1 for OS/2 ATI Special Edition GRADD BBS driver installation directory, do the following: 1. Open an OS/2 full-screen or OS/2 window session. 2. Before running the SDDSE*.EXE self extracting zip file (the exact name depends on the release build number), change the current directory to the "installation directory" in which you wish to store the SciTech Display Doctor GRADD BBS driver installation files. It should be something *other* than x:\sdd, where "x:" is your boot drive. We suggest C:\ATI\SDD. At the OS/2 command prompt, type the following commands: C: MD C:\ATI MD C:\ATI\SDD CD C:\ATI\SDD 3. You may wish to copy the SDDSE*.EXE self extracting zip file to the installation directory first. Then at the OS/2 command prompt, type the following command: SDDSE* -o 4. Use SET LANG= to set the correct language. The language may already be correctly set in your CONFIG.SYS. If not, then at the OS/2 command prompt, type one of these SET LANG= commands to choose your language: SET LANG=ar_AA for Arabic (English with Arabic graphics formatting) SET LANG=pt_BR for Brazil SET LANG=zh_CN for Simplified Chinese SET LANG=de_DE for Germany SET LANG=da_DK for Denmark SET LANG=es_ES for Spain SET LANG=el_GR for Greece (English with Greek graphics formatting) SET LANG=fi_FI for Finland SET LANG=fr_FR for France SET LANG=iw_IL for Israel (English with Hebrew graphics formatting) SET LANG=it_IT for Italy SET LANG=ja_JP for Japan SET LANG=ko_KR for Korea SET LANG=nl_NL for Netherlands SET LANG=no_NO for Norway SET LANG=sv_SE for Sweden SET LANG=zh_TW for Taiwan SET LANG=en_US for English (default) 5. The SETUP command in the installation directory may then be used to install the proper language dependent files and configuration information from the install directory onto your boot drive. Running SETUP without any options will give brief syntactic help about the SETUP command (described later in detail in this README file) in your chosen or default language. To see this help, at the OS/2 command prompt, type the following command: SETUP SETTING YOUR DISPLAY TO VGA MODE ________________________________ If your display is in sync and you otherwise have a usable Desktop, we recommend that you use Selective Install to set your display to VGA mode. Otherwise, use the following procedures to return to VGA mode. 1. Turn on your computer. If your computer is already on, shutdown or press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart it. 2. When a small white box appears in the upper left-hand corner of your screen, press Alt+F1. 3. When the Recovery Choices screen appears, press function key F3 or the letter "V" depending on the operating system version. 4. Run Selective Install to change the Windows drivers. Once the computer has booted, your display adapter is restored and can work in VGA mode. If you want to install a new display adapter or graphics device driver, refer to the chapter entitled "Video Procedures" in the User's Guide to OS/2 Warp. ATTENDED INSTALLATION _____________________ To do an attended install of the SciTech Display Doctor/se GRADD Drivers from the self extracting zip file installation directory, do the following: 1. Open an OS/2 full-screen or OS/2 window session. 2. Before running the extracted SETUP.CMD file, use SET LANG= to set the correct language. The language may already be correctly set in your CONFIG.SYS. The section of this README entitled "Extraction" gives examples. 3. At the OS/2 command prompt, type the following command to copy all the required files to the OS/2 boot drive: <SrcPath>SETUP xxx [<SrcPath>] [<BootDrive>] [/u] Where: xxx is one of: "GEN" - Generic VESA Unaccelerated GRADD "SDD" - SciTech Display Doctor GRADD "VGA" - Video Graphics Array (VGA) GRADD <SrcPath> for SETUP is required if SETUP is not in the current directory. [<SrcPath>] parameter is optional (required if next parameter specified) and is the installation directory. [<BootDrive>] is optional and is the drive where OS/2 is installed. [/u] is optional and indicates an unattended install such as for CID installations. A CID response file is not required. Then press Enter. 4. When prompted to do so, shutdown, and then restart your computer. NOTES: 1) During the installation of this driver, DISPLAY.LOG and DSPINSTL.LOG files are created or appended to in the OS2\INSTALL directory. These files identify the OS/2 system files that were updated and indicate whether the installation was successful and reasons for failure. The contents of these files might be useful if you need to report an installation problem. 2) You may be prompted about whether you want to overlay certain files where the target file is newer than the source file. In general, you should answer YES to all the prompts unless you have previously experienced specific problems with the driver and are reinstalling it. 5. After the computer reboots, the desktop should be in the 640x480x256 display mode. Do the following to configure correctly for your current display and choose an appropriate resolution and refresh rate: a. Open the SciTech Display Doctor/se 7.1 folder. b. Open the System object. c. When the Settings notebook appears, select the Screen tab. If the monitor listed is correct, you can skip to step e. d. Go to Screen Page 2, and select your monitor. The current version requires you to close the System object and reopen it in order to have your monitor selection affect the list of resolutions and refresh rates available. e. On Screen Page 1, select a resolution, color depth, and refresh rate. Depending on your adapter and display, refresh rates may not be selectable. f. Close the Settings notebook. g. Shutdown and restart your computer. 6. When you have completed the installation, all the SciTech Display Doctor command line utilities will be located in the x:\sdd directory, where "x:" is your OS/2 boot drive. Most will also be found in the SciTech Display Doctor/se 7.1 folder on your desktop. INSTALLATION IN A CID ENVIRONMENT _______________________________ NOTES: 1. Create a directory on the server (e.g. X:\ATI\SDD) and extract the installation files from the self extracting SDDSE*.EXE file to the X:\ATI\SDD installation directory as described under the section entitled "Extraction". 2. You must have OS/2 successfully installed on the client using the CID (Configuration Installation Distribution) method. 3. To configure display selection, resolution and refresh rate, refer to the file "README.CFG" in this package. To install a device driver using CID, use the following information to modify your LCU command file. The example below installs the SciTech Display Doctor/se GRADD (SDDGRADD). NOTE: The following information is meant as a guide. Your LCU command file might be different. /*****************************************************/ /* LCU PRODUCT DATA SECTION */ /*****************************************************/ . . . x.graddvideo = 15 x.15.name='SciTech Display Doctor GRADD Video' x.15.statevar = 'CAS_' || x.15.name x.15.instprog = 'x:\ati\sdd\setup.cmd', ' sdd', ' x:\ati\sdd ' || bootdrive, ' /u' x.15.rspdir = '' x.15.default = '' /*****************************************************/ /* NUMBER OF PROGRAMS SET UP IN THE */ /* PRODUCT DATA SECTION */ /*****************************************************/ NUM_INSTALL_PROGS = 15 /*****************************************************/ /* INSTALLATION SECTION */ /*****************************************************/ . . . when OVERALL_STATE = 2 then do if RunInstall(x.graddvideo) == BAD_RC then exit Call CheckBoot end . . . /******************************************************/ /* ROUTINE SECTION */ /* The following information should already exist in */ /* the LCU command file. */ /******************************************************/ . . . RebootAndGotoState: parse arg new_state, other rc2 = SetState(new_state, 'RebootAndGotoState', 1) /* Set the state */ /* to go to in */ /* OVERALL_STATE */ Call SaveStates /* Save the environment vars */ Call Reboot /* Reboot the computer */ return . . . /*****************************************************/ /* END OF LCU INFORMATION TO BE ADDED */ /*****************************************************/ RESTORING YOUR SYSTEM IN CASE OF FAILURE ________________________________________ If SciTech Display Doctor does not correctly boot on your system, you can easily switch back to the GENGRADD drivers to boot your system to a workable state again. To revert to GENGRADD, do the following: 1. Boot to an Alt-F1/F2 command prompt mode. 2. Edit CONFIG.SYS file and change the line C1=SDDGRADD to C1=GENGRADD,SBFILTER Remove the line "DEVICE=x:\OS2\SDDHELP.SYS". Remove the line "SET VCFG_NO_DDC=TRUE". 3. Delete or rename the x:\OS2\SVGADATA.PMI file. 4. Shutdown and reboot your system. If that fails you will need to revert to VGA mode and reinstall your prior display drivers. REMOVING SCITECH DISPLAY DOCTOR _______________________________ SciTech has included an uninstall program you can use to completely remove SciTech Display Doctor and all its components from your system. To remove SciTech Display Doctor, simply run the x:\SDD\UNINSTAL.EXE program, where x: is the OS/2 boot drive. This will remove all files, and revert your system to VGA mode. From there simply reinstall your original display drivers or GENGRADD or VGAGRADD. ADVANCED OPTIONS........................................................... GAMON MONITOR SELECTION PROGRAM _______________________________ If you have a plug and play monitor, SciTech Display Doctor will automatically detect its capabilities. If your monitor is not detected, you can configure it using page 2 of the Screen properties in the System object, or the command-line GAMON utility. GAMon is a simple program to allow you to select a monitor that is attached to your graphics card. Selecting a monitor will filter the available display modes and refresh rates depending on the capabilities of your attached monitor. If you wish to use the command line version of this or other SciTech programs, you may wish to add the path "x:\sdd" to your OS/2 command search path, where "x:" is your OS/2 boot drive. To display the current monitor configuration, use the following command: gamon show To select a monitor you must know the manufacturer and model name for your monitor. To list all available manufacturers, use the following command: gamon mfr This will produce a rather long list, so you can narrow the list by entering the start of the manufacturer name as below, and list all monitors that manufacturer makes: gamon model nec which will list all 'NEC Technologies' monitors. Once you have found your monitor, you can select it by entering the partial manufacturer name and a partial model name like so: gamon select nec xp21 which will select the 'NEC Technologies' 'NEC XP21' monitor. If you need to make a selection with spaces in the name, use the quoting characters: gamon select "NEC Technologies" "NEC XP21" If your monitor is not listed, you can add it to the database. The majority of monitor manufacturers include INF files for Windows 9x with their monitors, and/or provide them on their web sites. You can import these files using: gamon import <filename.inf> where <filename.inf> is the name of the INF file. Since the command-line program is a bit archaic, it is recommended that you use page 2 of the Screen properties page instead. GAREPORT HARDWARE REPORT PROGRAM ________________________________ This is a simple program which will load the SciTech Nucleus display driver for your hardware, and report the graphics hardware configuration. GACTRL CONFIGURATION PROGRAM ____________________________ This program allows you to perform compatibility testing on the Nucleus device drivers, including testing the graphics modes, stereo modes (which won't work under OS/2 yet unless you have hardware stereo), DPMS Power Management and DDC communications. One of the other useful things that this program can do is allow you to adjust the centering and refresh rate control for all available display modes (including text modes for OS/2 command prompts!). Use the 'Centering and Refresh' menu item to change the refresh rate and centering values for individual display modes, or the 'Global Refresh Rate' menu item to set all display modes to a preferred refresh rate. Of course the centering and refresh control will eventually be controlled by our SciTech Display Doctor GUI control center, but that component is still under development and not ready for testing. NOTE: Changing the global refresh rate *also* changes the refresh rate for VGA text modes to your preferred value. You may want to reset the text modes back to 70Hz manually if the refresh rate controlled text modes cause problems. GAOPTION OPTIONS SELECTION PROGRAM __________________________________ This is a simple command line program to allow you to override some of the useful options for the SciTech Nucleus drivers. You will need to reboot before any of the options will take effect for the SDDGRADD display drivers. To see the current list of options and settings, use the following command: gaoption show This will show all the options for the current device. Some of the more useful options are explained below: gaoption accel [none | basic | most | full] This option controls what hardware acceleration features are used by the drivers. By default full hardware accleration is enabled. If you have problems with the mouse cursor, try 'most', which will disable hardware acceleration of the mouse cursor. The 'basic' setting will allow for basic acceleration features and is useful if you have problems with line drawing or text. The 'none' option turns off all hardware acceleration in the driver. gaoption vga [on | off] These options control whether the VGA fallback driver is used by default, or whether the native hardware accelerated drivers are used. By default this option is off, but you may want to enable it if the native driver has problems on your system. gaoption prefer32 [on | off] gaoption prefer16 [on | off] The prefer32 option controls whether you would prefer 32-bit display modes over 24-bit display modes to show up in the list of available display modes for the SDDGRADD driver. The default is to choose 32-bit modes in preference to 24-bit modes if the mode exists at both color depths, and both color depths are fully accelerated. Otherwise the highest performance mode is always chosen. Similarly, the prefer16 option controls whether you would prefer 16-bit display modes over 15-bit display modes, but all modes at both of these color depths are always available for the SDDGRADD driver. gaoption nowcomb [on | off] This option controls whether the Nucleus drivers will attempt to enable write combining on your system for faster system memory to video memory transfers. By default write combining will always be used where possible, but if this is causing problems you may wish to try using this option to disable write combining support. The most likely scenario would be for a new processor that has not yet been fully QA tested. MISCELLANEOUS TIPS........................................... FixPak-Specific Problems ________________________ OS/2 FixPaks contain updates to the core GRADD system, parts of which will never be updated by SDD. Therefore, updating to the latest FixPak can often clear up some graphics problems. Unfortunately, there are sometimes exceptions, and new problems appear. If there are known workarounds to these problems, we will try to list them here. ** Washed-out icons ** In Warp 4 FP14 and above, WSeB FP2, and the Convenience Paks, there is new "enhanced stretch-blitting." This new feature has one known ill side-effect, where some of the icons for folders and other items will appear "washed out" when running in 24bpp or 32bpp. To fix this, you can disable the new feature by adding the following line to your Config.Sys file: SET ENH_STRETCH=NO This setting will not take affect until after you reboot. ** Reverting to VGA in Warp 3 ** Using the revert to VGA function in Warp 3 will cause some video components to be back-leveled to versions that are incompatible with GRADD, most notably DSPRES.DLL. If you use the revert to VGA function, you should update your video components with the versions found in the \OS2\INSTALL\VGA directory prior to installing SciTech Display Doctor. Relocating the Nucleus drivers ______________________________ If you are limited on disk space on your boot partition, it is possible to relocate the Nucleus drivers, which are normally located in the subdirectory \OS2\DRIVERS\NUCLEUS, to another drive. Create a new directory to hold these files, such as D:\NUCLEUS, then use xcopy to copy all files, including all of the subdirectories, from the original location. Then, add the following line to your Config.Sys file: SET NUCLEUS_PATH=D:\NUCLEUS where D:\NUCLEUS is the new directory that you created. Then, you may remove the files from the original location, and reboot. Switching between Screen Pages ______________________________ If for some reason you wish to disable the new SciTech Display Doctor Screen pages in the System object, it is possible to revert back to the standard ones by running the following command: C:\SDD\SDDVCFG.CMD R where C:\SDD is the directory that you installed into. To switch back to the enhanced Screen pages, simply run it without parameters: C:\SDD\SDDVCFG.CMD where C:\SDD is the directory that you installed into. SUPPORT................................................................... SciTech Display Doctor/se for OS/2 is distributed by ATI and is supported through normal ATI support channels. Please note that SciTech Software does not provide support for SciTech Display Doctor/se for OS/2. Users who purchase SNAP Graphics for OS/2 can get support directly from SciTech. (End of Document)