True Color in Windows 3.1?

[elbirth]

First some background:

I've got an old WinBook FX laptop (Pentium 133mhz, 32mb ram, 2gb harddrive) and I've installed Windows 3.1 on it in an attempt to make myself a digital picture frame. I found a piece of software that runs a slideshow beautifully and everything is great... except it only displays 16 colors...

It gave me a message saying I could find a driver and update it to display 256 colors, but that's still not enough for what I want. I want to display digital photographs at their full potential (albeit, only at like 800x600 resolution or even 640x480).

Is there anyway to display true color under Windows 3.1? I'd install Windows 95 on it (maybe even 98, if it'd run) but the laptop has no cdrom drive, and no USB ports for an external one. It has pcmcia slots, but I don't have a working cdrom to use that way either.


Just as an aside, I tried installing MuLinux and cloning it to the harddrive, but while using xli to try to display pictures, it kept rendering them at 256 colors... plus I could never actually get it to do a full-screen slideshow. I was going to install feh or something else for slideshows, but didn't have GCC installed, so I couldn't compile anything.


Any help on getting true color in Win3.1 or any other possible solutions to my problem?

 

[mikecel79]

What model WinBook is it? Some of them had cards that would only do 256 color at 800x600. If you find the right driver it will list what color bit depth it can use.

 

[elbirth]

hmm, the spot on the bottom of it for model number doesn't have anything written in it... it does have a serial number though... 96380075

 

[shortylickens]

I hate to crap on your parade buddy, but I am almost positive the driver replacement to get 256 colors is the MAX for windows 3.1.

If you wanted more than that you had to go out and use DOS. And there were few DOS 16-bit color games or programs.

 

[eminemrh25]

Hey,
Windows 95 did come on floppy disk set. I have a set.

YGPM

 

[AndyHui]

It's not a matter of drivers. Windows 3.1 is fully capable of displaying 16.7M colours, but I think you will find that the lack of frame buffer video RAM is what is limiting the lower number of colours at higher resolution. You should try and find out how much VRAM the thing has got.

 

[networkman]

Andy's got this one solid.

Click HERE for specs on the WinBook FX; you'll note the video ram is either 1 or 2 meg of DRAM. From what I can tell, the max colors supported on that notebook is 64k, not True Color(16million). In fact, I recall a company called Media Vision producing a video card with 2.25 meg of video ram just to support 16 million colors - otherwise you had to have a 4meg card to do it(and that was EXPENSIVE back in the day).

 

[elbirth]

Thanks for the info, all. I'll ask the guy I got the laptop from to see if he knows for sure about the video ram (it doesn't list it on bootup, but it does give the other basic info... processor speed, ram, harddrive space...

When I had MuLinux installed, I do recall opening a picture of my cat in XLI and his face looked near-perfect, but I could see some color shifting in the inside-portion of his ears, as well as the person's hand in the picture, so I'm confident that it should be able to at least display a decent picture, if not perfect like I'd like... if not, I may end up selling the laptop and trying to get another one really cheap that I verify beforehand to work....

 

[imported_BikeDude]

Originally posted by: networkman
WinBook FX; you'll note the video ram is either 1 or 2 meg of DRAM. From what I can tell, the max colors supported on that notebook is 64k, not True Color(16million).

But 16-bit colours should suffice plenty for his needs. The laptop screen won't be able to show 16.7 mill colours in any case, so... (just save the image with 65536 colours -- most apps will dither the output to make the picture hard to distinguish from the real thing, atleast on a cheap or old LCD)

In fact, I recall a company called Media Vision producing a video card with 2.25 meg of video ram just to support 16 million colors - otherwise you had to have a 4meg card to do it(and that was EXPENSIVE back in the day).

I remember buying a 4MB Matrox Millennium in '96 or so. A great card!

But 800x600 in 24-bit colours, that's 1.44MB, so if he has 2MB video ram, then that is plenty enough. However, the amount of video ram wasn't as important as having a proper RAMDAC...