Doing Windows XP in accelerated graphics

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vtailor
Posts: 229
Joined: Mon Sep 24, 2012 6:54 pm

Doing Windows XP in accelerated graphics

Post by vtailor »

Granted that the gma500 graphics driver from Compulab is extremely good at graphics acceleration on the gma500, indistinguishable from later gma graphics, there is still the question of picking a graphics mode that fills the screen completely at 16:9, something that is almost there in the Compulab driver.

I recently chanced upon a similar and related problem using the Cedarview chipset, gma3600, under Windows XP. At this Time, Intel only offers a non-accelerated EMGD driver kit for Windows XP and a fully operational graphics driver for Windows 7 and 8. It turns out that the only difference discernable between the result of using the EMGD kit and the Windows 7 driver is the setup.exe program. The Windows 7 setup.exe program uses two kernel.dll calls that are not implemented in the Windows XP kernel. As a test, I copied the Windows 7 unzipped driver graphics files into the EMGD kit installed graphics driver directory. Restarting the system, Windows XP put up several "Do you want to execute this (e. g., graphics tray) program message boxes from the Windows 7 files I had copied over. In other words, and with testing, I have reason to believe that I managed to install the otherwise compatible Windows 7 driver into Windows XP.

The question is whether that strategy can be made to work on the Compulab gma500 to get a full range of accelerated 16:9 graphics. No answer yet, but am looking at alternatives.

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