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Scitech Display Doctor for OS/2 - by Christopher B. Wright
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Summary: The Scitech drivers have entered the ninth beta release. How useful are they?

Historically speaking, it's been a chore for OS/2 users to get decent video drivers.

My first experience with OS/2 was with an old Diamond SpeedStar video card (back in the days of VESA cards, remember them?) The driver that Diamond provided with their card was, to be polite, a steaming piece of... wait, I was trying to be polite.

The problem is, I didn't know that. All I knew was that my operating system kept locking up. What's the point, I wondered, of calling an OS "crash proof" when it was obviously flaking out left and right?

Of course, as soon as I bought a miro card my problems went away immediately. Video drivers are hit-or-miss with OS/2: either they work tolerably well and leave you alone, or they beat you about the head and shoulders without mercy.

Matrox is one of the few companies that provides consistent OS/2 support for their drivers... but even they don't support every feature available. For example, the G400 has a new dual-head feature that allows you to connect two monitors to one card... in Windows 9X and NT. The feature is unsupported in OS/2.

For the OS/2 user, buying a video card is a lot like playing Russian Roulette. It's possible to get a card that works, and works decently, but it's not guaranteed, even if OS/2 is listed as a supported platform. And then there's always the chance that support for OS/2 will be dropped, immediately, without notice or apology.

The Display Doctor Is In

The Scitech Display Doctor (SDD) drivers for OS/2, when finally released, will be an all-in-one solution to many of OS/2's display driver woes. Scitech has created a product that not only supports a staggering number of video cards under OS/2, but will also support "high end" features.

The drivers are currently in their ninth beta release. While they don't currently support all the cards that Scitech plans to support, they do support a wide variety of them... including newer cards like the ATI 128 cards, the Matrox G400, the Nvidia cards, and some non-accelerated support for the Voodoo 3dfx cards.

I remember testing the beta drivers back when it was only at beta 4, and I can tell you that the driver itself has improved tremendously. Scitech has been very responsive to user feedback, and they've fixed many (but not all) of the problems I'd noticed in the past.

Installation

Installation instructions for the Scitech drivers are contained in a readme.txt file that is archived with the drivers themselves. The instructions recommend that you set your display to VGA before installing the drivers, which I did. Then I rebooted, opened up a command prompt, moved over to my installation directory and typed "setup sdd." The SDD install scripts did their thing, and told me to reboot.

I crossed my fingers. This is the part where, during my first test of Beta 4, I was on the receiving end of a horrible system crash as SDD tried to load its drivers and conflicted with something nasty that had been hanging around on my machine. The fix at the time had been to delete an entire directory tree within my c:\os2\system directory, and I was hoping I wouldn't have to do that.

Thankfully, I didn't. It loaded the drivers, then told me I had 21 days to evaluate the program. (It will tell you that on bootup and force you to hit the enter key in order to keep booting. An annoying nagware feature that disappears if you register the program).

In earlier betas, some users who were installing a beta on top of an earlier beta would get a message that the 21 day evaluation limit had expired, even if it hadn't. I don't know if that's a problem with this one because I installed it on a clean system.

Finally, the Workplace Shell came up at a resolution of 640x480 and displaying a whopping 256 colors. Now it was time to get everything set up properly...

Use

The Scitech Display Doctor drivers, even as a beta, give you a lot of powerful features if it supports your card. The SDD drivers seem to support my Matrox Millennium G400 very well, and they already give me more capability than the native Matrox drivers do. At the moment I'm running the card at 1800x1350 at 64,000 colors at a 120.6 Hz refresh rate - but I can go as high as 2048x1536 in resolution (at 16 million colors), and I can get the full 32 bit color depth (at resolutions up to 1920x1440).

Because Scitech Display Doctor gives your video card abilities above and beyond what OS/2 is capable of understanding (for example, OS/2 has no built-in concept of any color depth beyond 16 million colors), it provides its own set of utilities for configuring everything. You can still set your basic resolution and color depth via the system settings folder - although because it doesn't understand what a 32 bit color depth is, all 32 bit color depth resolutions are displayed as 16 million color depth resolutions... which means it appears as though there are two sets of 16 million color depth resolution settings in the screen resolution field.

If you want to adjust your display area, detect your monitor or setting your refresh rate you will need to run some of Scitech's tools, which are currently full-screen OS/2 command line programs. Scitech is planning on providing WPS utilities that do the same thing eventually, but for the moment it simply creates WPS icons for its command line utilities so they can be accessed more conveniently from your desktop.

The utilities themselves seem archaic (what? No widgets, drop down lists, check boxes, or radio buttons?) but they are quite functional. SDD detected my monitor's capabilities quickly, and let me test all my settings before I committed to them.

One of the neat features that Matrox's drivers have is the ability to reduce the font size of text in OS/2 and Win-OS/2 sessions displaying resolutions over 1024x768, which is when OS/2 mysteriously decides you didn't really want all that screen space so it makes everything LARGER to take it away again. The Scitech drivers allow you to reduce the font size of OS/2 sessions, but not Win-OS/2 sessions which makes seamless Win-OS/2 sessions look a bit distorted and unusual. The drivers also don't reduce the icon size, but it is compatible with programs like Dialog Enhancer which can do that in its place.

Currently, the ability to display "small fonts" is based on a single line in your config.sys file. Scitech plans to increase this ability, so that it will ultimately be a WPS program that will allow you to customize your icon and font sizes as you wish. Something to look forward to.

Bugs Fixed

Scitech has fixed a lot of the showstopper problems I'd had with it in earlier versions. For example, one of the most frustrating things in early betas was that they were incompatible with programs like Process Commander and Watchcat. Any time I'd try to bring up a Process Commander full screen session I'd lock up my machine, hard. The latest beta, happily, doesn't have that problem. I'd completely forgotten the problem existed until I automatically hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up a Full Screen session, then shrieked incoherently as I remembered that I wasn't supposed to do that with SDD installed. Imagine my relief when that full screen session actually opened!

Another problem was that irregular mouse shapes would often be replaced with solid black boxes. For example, Photo>Graphics PRO changes the shape of the mouse when you select certain tools. In older versions of the beta, the mouse would be represented as a solid black cube, and it wouldn't be terribly useful. In the latest beta progress has been made: while there is still a black square where a mouse should be, there is also a white outline of the correct mouse shape overlaid on the cube - not a perfect fix, but a sign that progress is being made.

Dynamic drivers

Probably the coolest feature of the Scitech Display Drivers is the ability to automatically detect and configure a supported card. As an experiment I shut down my computer, opened my case, removed my G400 and replaced it with an ATI Rage 128 AGP Card. I turned on the power and watched in amazement as it booted as if nothing had changed! It even retained my resolution and color depth settings (though I imagine if they were out of the new card's reach it would have defaulted to something else). Then I shut down the machine and replaced the ATI Rage 128 with the G400, turned it on, and again it loaded without any problems.

This is what Windows 98 tries (and fails) to do when it detects new hardware. It didn't require an extraneous reboot, it didn't stop and think about it (as far as I could tell, anyway); all it did was detect the new card and load it up.

Licensing Information

The beta is set up to expire after 21 days of use, after which it expires and will not work. As far as testing a beta product goes, this is fine - but it appears that for some video cards, the Scitech Display Drivers already give you more capabilities and better performance than a card's native driver. For people who wish to use the beta drivers all the time, you can pre-register and purchase a license for the final product. Doing so will also allow you to unlock the betas so they won't expire.

Originally, Scitech had intended to provide two versions of their product. A cheap generic driver and a more expensive driver with more capabilities, support for higher resolutions, etc. Since that time, it appears as though IBM has licensed the technology from Scitech, and that what would have been the "generic" product will actually be available for free from IBM. The high-end driver will still be available from Scitech, and it will support the high resolutions and increased color depths.

Final Evaluation

When I originally experimented with the Scitech Display Driver betas (betas 3 and 4) I thought to myself, "Someday this will be a really useful driver, but my Matrox drivers are fine so I don't know if I'll ever bother to get it." After playing around with beta 9, it already seems to surpass the Matrox drivers feature set and seems at least as stable... and to be honest, I'm probably going to pre-register for the drivers so I can use this beta beyond its 21 day evaluation period.

If your card is listed as a supported card on Scitech's site, there's a good chance their drivers will work well with your card and your monitor. HOWEVER, and I cannot stress this enough, if you are thinking of pre-registering the product, make sure you test it with your card beforehand! This is still a beta product, and as such there are no guarantees that it will work well on your machine. If it does, that's great and you can get a lot of mileage out of it, but try the beta for a week or two before you commit to paying for it.

Based on the astounding progress Scitech has made since beta 4, I'm convinced that by the time they go gold they will be an outstanding, must-have addition to your operating system.

The Scitech Display Drivers: Scitech Software, Inc.. Currently in Beta, but you can pre-order the drivers for $36.95 (license only), or $39.95 + Shipping and Handling if you want the driver shipped to you on a disk.

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Copyright © 1999 - Falcon Networking ISSN 1203-5696 November 1, 1999