From: jbormel_at_warren.med
Date: Fri Jan 21 1994 - 17:17:50 EST
Subject: re: More Update external VIDEO/ AUDIO problems
dewar writes:
>incidentally, I phoned IBM and complained about not receiving my audio
>driver disk that had been promised months ago. Well the other day I got
>an envelope with a hand written address containing a diskette with the
>audio drivers with a sloppily hand written label. Nice that someone was
>willing to go to the trouble of doing a special copy for me, but why on
>earth aren't the official diskettes out yet?
------- Comment on above: --------
The most frustrating part for me is that they're doing a tough
exceedingly complicated job (supporting state of the art
hardware, the TP750, across two operating systems, in a sea
of incomapatible code from many players) and they've
got it ~ALMOST~ right. The audio support seems to work cleanly
on my machine in DOS, DOS/Windows, OS/2, and pretty much in OS/2
DOS boxes. So, naturally, I need WIN-OS2 support which seems
to be absent. And no one will acknolwedge understading that
well enough to confirm that its a problem and if it is being
addressed. Or, what the audio disks that 'will be sent' are
supposed to fix.
---- External Video in high res ---
I recieved a very interesting FAX from IBM yesterday entitled
"Instructions for setting up external Display with
high resolution modes for 750 Thinkpads." It is for OS/2 2.1.
It starts out with a half page of what doesn't work. After
that, it expressed the
need of the customer to re-install OS/2 and sVGA support before
following the next page and a half of step by step instructions.
" do this and shutdown, do that and shut down, etc.
There is no mention in it about
moving system.ini in and out of os2/mdos/winos2 which seems to be
necessary for install to have effects on win-os2.
It focuses on SETCRT and CHANGRES. It allows you to change
resolutions without carrying around diskettes, using CHANGRES.
It works! (I haven't switched back to 640 x 480 yet, that's later today).
Seemless windows in 1024x768 works. The refresh isn't perfect but
its not worse that at the 640x480 level, ie it's livable. Also,
windows still steals colors from the palette used by the WPS, but that's
the way Windows 3x works without OS/2 so you can't fault the thinkpad,
OS/2 or the TP video driver.
The fax content is not closely related to the READ.ME
on the video disk, nor the manual
sections in the OS/2 manual. I can't relate it to the FAQ file
because I've never seen that! ;-) It will be nice when its out...
------- The SYSTEM ERROR, INCORRECT SYSTEM VERSION --- error I was
getting that made it impossible to run Dos boxes under DOS/WIN 3.1
has been tracked down to the system.ini file:
GOOD: display=vddc24.386 <--- problem goes away.
BAD: display=*vddvga <--- problem comes back
To determine this, I had to save the windows subdiretories, re-install
windows in a system that had no trace of windows (no windows directory and
the contents hidden in a zip),
compare working and non-working systems file by file, then line by line.
Thank goodness for a variety of wonderful tools. So, if I understood
what *vddvga meant, I'd have the whole puzzle. I do understand that
the video driver was a the root of the problem. And the fix, changing
the display= is easy. Of course, I don't know what will happen if OS/2
needs the *vddvga if I change this and dual boot back to OS2.
Hopefully this will all become irrelevant with the development of
either a new video driver, the new video installation instructions, or
both. In the meantime, this may help us stay up and running till that
day.
I haven't shared this finding with IBM, who is tracking it as 5X-070,PSW.
They seem to be struggling with dispatching and tracking problems
and haven't a good system for allowing customers to quickly electronically
search a bug database. It will cost me an hour to get to the
right person to explain it to. It would be nice if they were on
this mailing list, and they posted to us what faxes are pertinent to
tp750 on their FAX server. This is much more efficient for me than
sitting on hold on their 800 number. It's also cheaper for them
to have me using e-mail or a gopher than to help them support AT&T thru
800 service fees.
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