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 4.2 at the request of
VESA organisation, and is no longer
freeware. In version 5.1, VBE/Core 2.0 support was added. 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 was never widely available. Only pre-releases were available to the 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 February 28, 2002, followed by a Windows beta on March 1, 2002. 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 4 October 2009, the FTP site is no longer available; this seems to be related to the acquisition of SciTech Software by Alt Richmond Inc. in December 2008. One attempt to provide an alternative to SciTech's products was FreeBE/AF, but the last release was on 27 June 1999. ==Compatibility==