Advance Projects - AdvanceMAME SVGAWIN Windows Utility Documentation

Documentation of the AdvanceCAB svgawin utility.

AdvanceCAB SVGAWIN Driver Installer For Windows 2000/XP

1 Synopsis

svgawin [/l] [/u]

2 Description

The `svgawin' utility installs and uninstalls the svgawin.sys driver in Windows NT/2000/XP.

AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMENU work also without this driver, but you lose the ability to set an arbitrary video mode.

If you install it, AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMENU automatically try to use it before any other driver, unless you set a specific driver with the `device_video' option in the configuration files.

You must run this installation utility as Administrator.

3 Options

These are the command line options supported:

Install and run the driver.

Stop and uninstall the driver.

4 Troubleshooting

The svgawin drivers are inherently unsafe because they should coexist with the normal Windows drivers.

The most common problem is that the Windows driver sets the video card in a state that the SVGAWIN driver cannot understand or restore.

The only possible solution is to try to reduce the video hardware acceleration at the minimum in DisplayProperties/Settings/Advanced/Troubleshooting.

If you want a stable solution you must use the Linux or DOS version of AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMENU.

Alternatively you can try to use two different video boards, one for Windows and the other for the game display. Check the `device_svgawin_skipboard' option to control which video board to use.

5 Tech

This driver is used to export at user level some reversed operations generally available only at kernel level. Specifically you can:

Access the PCI information.
Use direct port io.
Map and umap physical memory.
Call specific IOCTL_VIDEO_* ioctl on the Windows VIDEO driver.

It doesn't contains any specific video board code. It only exports these basic services.