History
The software started out as The Universal VESA TSR (UNIVESA), written by Kendall Bennett. It was renamed to Universal VESA BIOS Extensions (UniVBE) in version 5, which supports VBE/Core 2.0, and no longer a freeware.
In version 5.2, it was renamed to Scitech Display Doctor. However, UniVBE continued to be the name used for the actual driver.
Version 6 included support of VBE/Core 3.0, VBE/SCI.
Version 6.5 introduced the ability to use Scitech Display Doctor as wrapper video driver.
Version 7 supports VESA/MCCS, and included Scitech GLDirect, an OpenGL emulator. This version was also ported to OS/2 and Linux (as version 1.0). However, the proposed product has never been widely available. Only pre-releases are available to public. In the Windows SDD prerelease, it included DOS UniVBE driver 7.20 beta, the Scitech Nucleus Graphics driver, GLDirect 2.0 and 3.0 beta. SDD 7 was first released on OS/2 on 2002-02-28, followed by Windows beta on 2002-03-01.
SciTech Display Doctor 7.1 marked the final release of SDD, which was available on OS/2, among other operating systems. However, the Scitech Nucleus Graphics engine lived on as SciTech SNAP (System Neutral Access Protocol) Graphics, SciTech SNAP DDC, and SciTech VBE Test Suite 8.0. Unlike UniVBE, SciTech SNAP Graphics is designed as fully accelerated binary compatible graphic device driver, rather than patching a GPU BIOS to be VESA-compliant.
Display Doctor is no longer supported by SciTech Software. SciTech Display Doctor 5.3a, SciTech Display Doctor 6.53, and UniVBE 6.7 were available on their FTP site, but as of 2009-10-04, the FTP site no longer seems to be available; this seems to be related to the acquisition of SciTech Software by Alt Richmond Inc. 2008-12. Please see the SciTech SNAP article for more details.
One attempt to provide an alternative to SciTech's products was FreeBE/AF, but the last release was 1999-06-27.
Read more about this topic: Uni VBE
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