Linear framebuffer access & darker system palette
After two years, this is the first release that supports blitting directly onto the screen as a linear framebuffer, rather than needing to access it one window at a time! For now (probably for ever!) this is only supported in pattern blits (e.g. colouring all or part of the screen) and non-pattern screen-to-screen blits (e.g. scrolling or moving a window), but it definitely gives significant performance improvement on emulated CPUs (e.g. Dosbox, or QEMU without VT-x)!
Now that there is a mechanism within the driver for direct access to a linear framebuffer, for the first time the driver includes a DCI Provider, which can be used with Video for Windows. Admittedly, I don't have much experience with this, so I'm not sure how well it works, but feel free to try it out as per the instructions in the README.md…
The floppy image size in this release has also been reduced from 1.44M to 720k, since there was no need for it to be so large.
Lastly, this release resolves a discrepancy between the logical and physical values of system palette colours 01-06 in 8-bit mode, resulting in a less garish look when using that mode. This discrepancy was present in most if not all 256-colour Windows 3.1 drivers, so there is a config option to re-enable it if you prefer that look!
P.S. You may have noticed that development of this driver has slowed down a bit in the last couple of months. Basically, I was unemployed for the months of May and June, so I was in a position to work on this full-time, which is why there was such a burst of progress at that stage. This is no longer the case, so I'm afraid progress will be quite slow from now on. It hasn't taken that long to get from v0.8.0 to v0.9.0, but it'll probably take quite a lot longer to get from v0.9.0 to v1.0.0!