This file contains information about super VGA drivers and dot matrix printer drivers for Graphic Workshop. Dot matrix printer drivers for Graphic Workshop _______________________________________________ This version of Graphic Workshop includes the following dot matrix printer drivers. All the supplied drivers print to LPT1. You can redirect this with the DOS MODE command. If you write a custom driver you can have it print to any port you like. Note that while the external printer driver facility was implemented in Graphic Workshop to support dot matrix printers, you can write a driver to support pretty well any output device, including film recorders, FAX boards and so on. EPSNFX80.PDR This is a driver for the generic Epson FX-80 modes. It will work with many dot matrix printers, although with far less resolution than some newer printers can manage. EPSNFX80.ASM This is the source code for the generic Epson FX- 80 driver, for use as a starting point in writing your own custom driver. If you come up with a printer driver of your own, please send us the source and we'll include it in future releases of Graphic Workshop with suitable credit. GEMINI.PDR This is a driver for the 480 dot wide mode of the arcane Star Micronics Gemini 10X. The output from this printer is pretty ugly. The double resolution graphics mode of the Gemini 10X is a bit narrow, and pictures come out with badly distorted aspect ratios, so we didn't use this mode. PROPRINT.PDR This driver was written by Jim Dougherty for the IBM ProPrinter. We haven't tasted it, but it looks good. The following drivers were all written by Chris Rogers of Ashtree Software. They're particularly slick, in that they will ask you what resolution you want to print at. We have not tested these, but they look to be well written. EPNLQ132.PDR - Epson LQ series printers, wide carriage EPNLQ80.PDR - Epson LQ series printers, narrow carriage EPNLQ950.PDR - Epson LQ-950 printers EPNLX132.PDR - Epson LX series printers, wide carriage EPNLX80.PDR - Epson LX series printers, narrow carriage IBMX24.PDR - IBM Proprinter X24, narrow carriage IBMXL24.PDR - IBM Proprinter X24, wide carriage PAN24132.PDR - Panasonic KX-P1124, wide carriage PAN2480.PDR - Panasonic KX-P1124, narrow carriage PAN9132.PDR - Panasonic 9 pin printers, wide carriage PAN980.PDR - Panasonic 9 pin printers, narrow carriage ROL24132.PDR - Roland 24 pin printers, wide carriage ROL2480.PDR - Roland 24 pin printers, narrow carriage ROL9132.PDR - Roland 9 pin printers, wide carriage ROL980.PDR - Roland 9 pin printers, narrow carriage Registered users of Graphic Workshop wishing to write their own drivers are welcome to whatever help we can supply. We can't teach you to program in assembler over the phone, but we can probably help you with basic questions and suggest ways around any problems you encounter. Super VGA card drivers for Graphic Workshop ___________________________________________ NOTE: As of version 2.4 of Graphic Workshop, the internal structure of the super VGA drivers changed a bit. The old drivers will no longer work with GWS.EXE. New versions of all the current drivers are included with this release... delete your old drivers. MORE NOTES: As of version 2.7, all the drivers were changed slightly. This involved using a slightly different technique for setting the VGA palette to make palette adjustments from within the VGA 256 colour mode look nicer. Older drivers... written after version 2.4 of Graphic Workshop... will still work, but you'll see a bit of screen trash when you adjust the VGA palette. This version of Graphic Workshop includes the following drivers: AMST1512.DRV This driver was developed by Marcel Ward in Aberystwyth, Wales. It allows owners of Amstrad PCs with the custom sixteen colour display cards supplied with these systems to look at colour images. We haven't tested this driver, lacking an Amstrad, but the source code looks right. The source code in A86 is also included. TSENG.DRV This driver was developed Gregory Weeks and should work with most super VGA cards based on the Tseng Labs chips. We haven't tested this driver, but it looks to be well written. Run TSNGINST.EXE to configure the driver for the various Tseng chips. The source code for the driver is included in TSENG.A86. This is an A86 source file, and may need a bit of fine tuning to assemble with MASM. This driver was updated by the author as of the version 5.0 release of Graphic Workshop. VGA640.DRV This is a very clever driver by Gregory Weeks (the author of TSENG.DRV, above) which displays 640 pixel wide 256-colour files on a 320 pixel wide screen by leaving out every alternate pixel. As the author notes in his remarks in the VGA640.A86 file, nothing is free and some detail is lost. However, if you have a VGA card with no 640 pixel wide, 256-colour mode... or one which there is no driver for as yet... you'll find that this driver is often preferable to the stock 320 by 200 pixel MCGA mode. ORCH512.DRV This driver was developed by Richard A. Bross for the Orchid 512K boards. This is a Tseng based board as well. It supports up to 800 by 600 pixels at 256 colours. Once again, we haven't tested this driver but it looks to be properly written. The source is in ORCH512.ASM. Thanks to all these authors for these drivers. TIGA.DRV This driver supports true 24-bit colour on a Hercules Graphic Station card. Note that a VGA card only actually does 18-bit colour. The 24 bit colour mode of the Graphic Station card has a resolution of 512 by 480 pixels. Its aspect ratio isn't all that good, but you can fiddle the monitor controls... for most monitors... to get pretty reasonable pictures. Surprisingly, 24-bit colour does not make an inordinate difference to most GIF files, as few scanners really make use of this degree of colour resolution. This driver is a bit slow, because of the way the Graphic Station card requires its video memory be updated in this mode. In answer to an obvious question, this driver should work on other cards supporting the Texas Instrument TIGA chip, but no promises... TRIDENT.DRV This is a driver for the Trident VGA graphic cards. It drives the card in its 640 by 400, 256 colour mode, and will work with cards having 256 kilobytes or more of onboard memory. We originally found the Trident card this driver was developed on in a Sun Moon Star 386SX we were loaned. It turned out that the monitor provided with this computer would not sync in the 640 by 400 256 colour mode, even though the card was doing fine. If you have this system, you probably won't be able to use this driver unless you spring for a multisync monitor. TRDNT512.DRV This will drive Trident cards with 512 kilobytes of memory on board to 480 lines in 256 colour mode. This is even harder on cheap monitors. We smoked one while developing this driver... fortunately, it was on loan. VIDEO7.DRV This is a driver for the Headland Technologies Video Seven VRAM and Video Seven 1024i cards. It supports the 640 by 480 line 256-colour mode. It uses the standard VGA and EGA 16-colour and monochrome modes... we decided not to implement the 1024 by 768 16-colour mode. There are very few 16-colour images around which could take advantage of this mode, but there are a lot of monitors which cannot. PARAPLUS.DRV This is a full featured driver for the Western Digital Paradise Plus card. This driver also works with the Dell Super VGA card, which is actually a Paradise 16-bit card. PARAPRO.DRV This is a driver for the Paradise Professional card (and clones thereof). It supports both the 640 by 400 and 640 by 480 pixel, 256 colour modes. DELLVGA.DRV This is a version of PARAPLUS.DRV, above. It has been modified not to use the 800 by 600 pixel EGA and monochrome modes of the Paradise card, as this causes the super VGA monitor on a Dell to click a (loud) internal relay every time it changes modes. If you don't mind the relay, or you want the 800 by 600 modes, use PARAPLUS.DRV, above. Note: rumour has it that some Dell systems have been shipped with Headland Video 7 cards rather than Paradise cards. If your Dell system is so equipped... or if you can't get GWS to work in the super VGA modes with one of the above two drivers... try VIDEO7.DRV. PARADELL.DRV This is a 512K version of DELLVGA.DRV, that is, a Paradise driver with the 800 by 600 monochrome mode disabled. ATIWONDR.DRV This is a driver for the ATI VGA Wonder and ATI VGA Edge cards. It drives the 256 colour screen in the 400 line mode, and will work with cards having 256K on them. The upper 256K on half meg cards will be ignored by this driver. ATI512.DRV This is a driver for ATI Wonder cards having 512K of memory on board. It will display pictures in up to 800 by 600 pixel resolution, selecting among the three available 256 colour display modes based on the dimensions of the image to be viewed. GRAFDRV.DRV This is a stock VGA card driver. You might want to use this if there is no super VGA card driver available for your card, however, as it handles the 16-colour and monochrome modes in potentially more useful ways than the internal VGA driver of Graphic Workshop does. VGA400.DRV This is a "gadget" driver for a stock VGA card which reprograms the beast into an undocumented 320 by 400 line mode. It should work on any VGA card, but being undocumented one cannot be sure. In any case, while interesting, this mode has such a squashed aspect ratio that it's not really useful for anything. In addition, having heavily interlaced memory, it's painfully slow to update. VGA480.DRV This is another undocumented mode. It gets still more on the screen, with still more distortion. To use one of these drivers, use GWSINSTL to select EXTERNAL for display type and enter the path to your driver in the path name field at the bottom of GWSINSTL screen. This should be the complete path, including the drive letter. Graphic Workshop does not assume that driver file names end in .DRV... you can call 'em anything you like. The name of the driver you've loaded should appear in the F10 "About" window when you're running GWS.EXE. Writing your own driver Also included with this version of Graphic Workshop is GRAFDRV.ASM, the source code for GRAFDRV.DRV. This file can be used as the boilerplate for writing your own super VGA card driver. You will need a pretty good grasp of assembly language and the hardware specific details of the card you want to write a driver for to get this together. This file should be assembled with Microsoft's MASM assembler, version 4.0 or better. The following batch file is useful in assembling GRAFDRV.ASM into GRAFDRV.DRV... or any other driver you happen to write. MASM %1 %1 NUL NUL IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO PROBLEM LINK %1 @AUTOLINK EXE2BIN %1 %1.DRV DEL %1.EXE DEL %1.OBJ :PROBLEM The file AUTOLINK must be present... it contains four carriage returns, that is, four blank lines. In future releases we hope to include a number of SVGA drivers with Graphic Workshop. If you write one using the GRAFDRV.ASM skeletal driver and care to send us the source, we'll be pleased to include it with future releases, with suitable credit. Registered users of Graphic Workshop who want to write their own drivers are welcome to the source code for all the above drivers... you might find some of the techniques used in them helpful in writing your driver. The only conditions are that you must be a registered user and we'd like to have the source code for the driver you write when you get it working... we'll include the object file in with future releases of Graphic Workshop. We'll be happy to give you whatever help we can in writing your driver, too. If you want the driver source files, please phone or write us and we'll send 'em off to you. Custom drivers We've been asked on a few occasions whether we'll write custom drivers for Graphic Workshop on behalf of various interested parties. We might be able to, depending on time and whathaveyou. If you really want a specific SVGA driver for Graphic Workshop... for example, if you want to licence it for inclusion with a particular card or computer... and you can't get it together yourself, contact us. Our address is in GRAFWORK.DOC.