Video Driver for Windows 3.x

[OrHoshmand]

Thank you so much for developing a brand new mouse driver for Windows 3.x. Can you also make a video driver for Windows 3.x that can work on VMware and supports True Color (2²⁴ colors)?

[NattyNarwhal]

The Windows 3.1 video driver model is really messed up, because it's expected you can implement most of GDI (to offload it). For reference, the stock DDK drivers for the PC98 video are 20k and 8514-likes are 27k. There's a reason everyone based video drivers off of the reference ones.

I think doing a better VESA driver or (for QEMU/Bochs/old VBox) Bochs extensions based on the SVGA driver is possible though. The binary patch for the SVGA driver to make it VESA-friendly is really unstable, and it'd be nice to do it right.

[ttimpe]

I was actually thinking of writing both of those drivers, however I was unable to do so. Fully working drivers (with auto-scaling and maybe even drag and drop) would be awesome. After that, an IPv6 stack would be nice :)

[blackcrack]

Thank you so much for developing a brand new mouse driver for Windows 3.x. Can you also make a video driver for Windows 3.x that can work on VMware and supports True Color (2²⁴ colors)?

https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/win31x.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20080705075940/http://oldfiles.org.uk/powerload/win3x.htm
https://www.japheth.de/

have fun by testing..

anyone should really "backup" and save svga drivers for both emulations like vmware and vbox,
more better could it be, it's directly by side of a great ;D mousedriver of this system :)

ttimpe, wär cool wenn man Win3.1 sauber am rennen halten könnte in den vmashins :)

need anyone the tcp/ip protocol for Win31b ? i change it against a networkdriver of Win31 for vbox :D

best
Blacky

[ttimpe]

I think everyone who wants to use this mouse driver knows about the SVGAPATCH driver already and knows how limited and buggy it is. This is mostly due to the segmented memory model of Win16. Even dosbox-x only works at up to 1600x1200 at 256 colors.

[NattyNarwhal]

24-bit colour sounds really hard but just simply doing the VESA patches right would seem a bit cleaner.

I think it's a bit out of scope for this repo, but I'll leave it open to shame someone into doing it someday 👀