tom9876543 wrote:VESA VBE 2.0 is unfortunately another example of a pathetic terrible API design.
I'm not going to argue with that. However, there was no way that a 32-bit VESA was going to come out at that point.
tom9876543 wrote:VBE 2.0 was released in 1994.
Released, yes, but only after three years in committee - they were already discussing it when VESA 1.2 was released. In any case, in 1994 there were still a number of new XTs and 286s shipping (not many, but they were cheap and no one really thought Windows was here to stay), and plenty of used ones around as well. Backwards compatibility was, sad to say, a significant concern, even for a standard applying to new motherboards.
tom9876543 wrote:The world was obviously moving to 32bit protected mode.
It's only really obvious in hindsight. More people ran MS-DOS without Windows than with it even at that point (trust me on this - I had to grapple with maintaining some MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 systems through Y2K, and saw some DOS boxes limping along as late as 2005). Windows 3.1 was still a hybrid 16/32 bit system, with the 32 bit subsystem crudely bolted on and highly unstable. No one actually believed Windows 95 would ship in 1995 (it almost didn't), or be truly 32 bit (it wasn't, not yet anyway). OS/2 had an effective market share of zero, and was mainly a 16-bit p-mode OS at the time, anyway. While Lotus 1-2-3 required protected mode, it was still mostly geared towards 16-bit p-mode, too, and the 32-bit system they used didn't play well with Windows. As for DOS extenders, those applied only to games, and no one at the time really took PC gaming seriously - remember, the shareware preview version of DOOM was less than a year old at that point, and even game developers were still leery of anything that didn't run on 8088 systems.
tom9876543 wrote:VBE 2.0 should of made it possible for multiple PCI video cards to operate independently, with a standard way to load their 32 bit code into the address space.
IIRC, there
were no PCI video cards until the middle of 1994, and they only came out because VLB had problems when used in Pentium systems. While PCI was developed in 1990 (as a response to MCA and the failure of EISA, both of which were almost forgotten about by 1994), it wasn't released until 1993, and it was originally designed (and used) for high-speed multi-Ethernet adapters - it was expected to be used exclusively on servers. The high-speed video standard at the time was VESA Local Bus, which was so dependent on the 80486 architecture that it broke when Pentiums came out, and had no ability to allow multiple video cards at all. When AGP (a modified version of PCI specifically for video cards, because PCI 1.0 was actually slower than VLB) came out a few years later, it didn't really support PCI bus mastering, either. Besides, most PCs still used ISA for video until around 1996 - only gamers would bother with an accelerated card, and gaming just wasn't seen as important by anyone who wasn't a gamer themselves.
The real question is, why was VBE 3.0 just a bug patch, and why was there no later 32-bit replacement? The answer is simple: no one wanted or needed one. By 1998, things were moving away from using the BIOS in general, and probably would have done so even if there were an adequate 32-bit extension to it; the only reason it had been relevant as long as it had was because MS-DOS's driver support was hopelessly inadequate.
More importantly, video card manufacturers like 3Dfx, ATI, and nVidia didn't
want their precious hardware shaders, texture renderers, etc. to work with generic drivers. Everyone had more or less lined up behind Windows 95, which let them be as proprietary as they cared to be as long as their drivers talked to GDI, and most of the main players were actively blocking the development of Linux drivers for their hardware - they didn't want to waste their own time on writing the drivers (something they were scrambling all over themselves to do a few years later), but they were damned sure not going to give out any proprietary information to the FOSS community, which they regarded as crazed anarchists. For their own part, most Linux enthusiasts of the time still sneered at the idea of a GUI, and those who didn't were up to their eyeballs just getting plain-vanilla Motif to work even as late as the release of AGPpart that same year. In the end, by 1998 VESA was seen as defining the
minimum requirements for a video card, and a very bare minimum at that.
Today, it isn't even a minimum. VBE - and BIOS support, period - is a dead letter for everyone who isn't an OS developer themselves, and even for us it is relevant only because the video card manufacturers are about as tight-lipped over their hardware APIs as KFC is about their eleven herbs and spices.
