virtualbox.org

Is there any way to set Windows 3.11 to run in 256 colors in VB? I've tried several different video drivers (both the ones listed natively) and one I downloaded and it always ends up with Windows not being able to load at all or the display being so garbled as to be useless.

Thank you.

I really do not think you are going to succeed with this (unless you are willing to write your own video driver ).

What do you need it for, anyway? Practically every Windows 3 program will run also run on Windows 95/98/Me, and Windows 98SE (especially) runs very well in VirtualBox. There are some complications in installing it, but there are instructions elsewhere on this forum.

Did you look in the tutorials sections, windows guests?

I presume you are referring to the section about setting a Custom Video Mode. If so, it's not immediately obvious how to apply this to Windows 3.11.

Windows 3.11 uses different screen drivers for different colour depths and screen sizes. For 640x480 with 16 colours it uses a driver called VGA.DRV; for 800x600 with 16 colours it uses a driver SVGA.DRV; for either size with 256 colours it uses one called SVGA256.DRV. (There are others supplied for other screen adapters, but these are really the only ones that stand much chance of being VESA-compatible.) As far as I know there is no general VESA driver available that will work with Win 3.11. The Bear Windows one won't, for instance.

The two drivers VGA.DRV and SVGA.DRV will work with VirtualBox; the driver SVGA256.DRV appears not to. There is no obvious way of feeding parameters (such as a VESA Mode ID) to any of these. This means that, although you can define the Custom Video Mode (and perhaps use it in DOS through Interrupt 0x10, though I haven't tried this) it is not simple to use it in Windows.

I think that the only way of getting this to work is either to patch the existing SVGA256.DRV file, or else write a new one. Either would be a huge task.

mpack wrote:Did you look in the tutorials sections, windows guests?

Sorry. I realise I misread you. I picked up that you meant the manual, whereas you actually spoke of the Tutorials section of this forum.

It appears that there is a patch that will work.