VESA BIOS Extensions

This is opposed to the "traditional" INT 10h BIOS calls, which are limited to resolutions of 640×480 pixels with 16 colour (4-bit) depth or less.

VBE is made available through the video card's BIOS, which installs some interrupt vectors that point to itself during boot up.

It allows applications to determine the capabilities of the graphics card and provides the ability to set the display modes that are found.

VBE/AF provides a low-level, standard interface to common acceleration functions available on most hardware.

Supplemental specifications provides device independent interface between application software and Super VGA hardware.

Currently (version 1.00), the VBE/AI specification defines three device classes: WAVE, MIDI, and VOLUME.

Device types not covered: Provides standard entry to vendor-specific extensions.

Provides hardware independent means for operating system and application to read and write data over I²C serial control interface.

Bit 15 is used by VGA BIOS as a flag to clear or preserve display memory.

They generally work by invoking Function 01h, which is more reliable than assuming a table of extended modes as it's part of the device's self-documentation.

The LILO boot loader passes this code based on a "vga" parameter in its configuration file.

[12] As indicated earlier, the VESA standard defines a limited set of modes; in particular, none above 1280×1024 are covered and, instead, their implementation is completely optional for graphics adapter manufacturers.

As vendors are free to utilize whatever additional values they please, this means that, in the table below, the modes denoted in red (and expressed in decimal form) may not apply to every graphics adapter!