On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Sol-Terrasa mkfs ext4 da' Sussex <alex.bu...@munted.org.uk> wrote: > On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 10:48 +0200, japhethx gmail wrote: >> The patched SVGA driver handles video output of Windows applications >> only. My >> guess is that for supporting DOS-based applications or TSRs one might >> additionlly need a VESA-compliant "virtual" SVGA driver (which usually >> have a .386 extension). > > One of my projects on my to do list was to write a device driver for > Windows 3.1x for high resolution displays i.e. beyond 1280x1024 with 16 > million colours. Sadly I've had to abandon it due to lack of > documentation and sources for existing device drivers.
One problem with such things - and a few did exist, back in the day - was Windows 3's resource limitations. It had a few 64K "heaps" for holding Windows Resources, which includes icons, window decorations (widgets) and internal data structures. The bigger the display, the more resources needed; also, the higher the colour depth, the more resources. Result, on 1280x1024 in 16M colours, after displaying the desktop & opening Program Manager, there sometimes wasn't enough memory left to open any apps at all. So, really, from someone who was there and had to support the damned thing, 17-18Y ago: you're not missing much. It looked impressive but it was sod-all use. If you want to get a feel for Win3-era Windows on a big desktop, use NT3. NT 3.51 was the last and best version & was a very good OS in its way. It was fast, stable, lean & efficient, it supported whacking great screens without issues, it ran most Win3 apps, it had a network stack & TCP/IP support out of the box, supported VFAT with LFNs and NTFS and OS/2's HPFS, and was generally a pleasure to work with. You could run Netscape 4 32-bit on it, too, for a pretty good Internet & Web experience - for 1995. But of course it doesn't run on DOS. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lpro...@gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
