Will VESA drivers conflict with video acceleration

[theerwproject]

I have recently discovered a really old game that requires VESA drivers. Does it trash video acceleration for some of these Direct X 9.0 video cards if I install VESA drivers? I still want to be able to play newer games as well.

I have Windows 98SE with an Nvidia FX 5200.

Thanks,

Eric

[theerwproject]

Of course, um, this may be a moot point anyway, as I cannot find any VESA drivers for Win98. The bulk seem to be for Linux.

[mjc]

Most modern video cards have enough VESA funtions 'built in' to handle almost any DOS game...just try the game.

[theerwproject]

Therein lies my problem. It says (from the MS-DOS prompt) "Unable to install or detect VBE 2.0."

I tried the game initially, as I knew that Voodoo and Matrox (my old video cards for my 300) had VESA as well as acceleration modes. In DosBox it gives me some obscure error code. Just trying to run it in Windows gives me a black screen, and then a crash to desktop.

[mjc]

What game is it?

[theerwproject]

The much-maligned Battlespire. I just had a hankering to install it to see how bad it was. I didn't like it when I first played it -- when I was able to. I had techs that outfitted my computer with dual video accelerator cards (a Diamond Monster & Matrox), Win 98, and DOS -- back in 98 it was the ultimate gaming machine. For some reason, other techs of the time had no idea how it was built. That's when I learned to fix computers and OSes myself.

Now that I've learned a few things and built my own (with just one video card, thank you) I can play most new things (usually a video driver upgrade is all that's needed), and, thanks to DOS Box, most old things. But VESA, somehow, is denied me. I've even used Sci-Tech's Display Doctor in a desperate (and perhaps dangerous) attempt. Ah well, Battlespire is the only game other than Blood that doesn't seem to work. Oddly enough, Daggerfall will work in Windows without tweaking; you can just double-click dagger.exe.