On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 14:22 +0100, Liam Proven wrote > > 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.
*sigh* I'd forgotten about that 64k limitation. :( But there still is a need for display drivers for WFWG users; there are a lot of new graphic hardware out there that have no display drivers available for WFWG. > 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 that was a long time ago, dare I hope you might have some sample sources for me to look at? I still want to write graphic device drivers for WFWG. > 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. I seem to remember there was once a port of NT 3.51 for Sun UltraSparcs. :) > But of course it doesn't run on DOS. Indeed not. -- http://www.munted.org.uk One very high maintenance cat living here. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
