Registry Keys for Display Drivers

Installable display drivers use several sets of registry keys to fully control their behavior. Because installable display adapters are usually implemented as PC Cards, their display drivers typically have registry entries both in the section of the registry devoted to PC Cards as well as the section devoted to display drivers.

This example shows the various registry keys that would be used by a PC Card based display driver called "GenericVGA". Here are the PCMCIA related keys, assuming that the display adapter has a Plug-and-Play ID:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Drivers\PCMCIA\FictCorp-PCMCIA_VGA_1.0-E832]
    "Dll"="VGAINIT.DLL"
    "Prefix"="VGA"
    Index=dword:1

Here are the keys that store the display driver's DLL name, screen size, and color depth:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Drivers\Display\GenericVGA]
    "Dll"="GENVGA.DLL"
    "CxScreen"=dword:280
    "CyScreen"=dword:F0
    "Bpp"=dword:8

Here are the keys created when the display adapter is inserted, by the PC Card driver's xxx_Init function:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Drivers\Display\Active\GenericVGA]
    "Dll"="GENVGA.DLL"
    "BufferMode"=Dword:0
    "Tapmode"=dword:0

For more information on the semantics of these keys, see The [Drivers\Display\] Key and Registry Keys Related to Windows CE Device Drivers.