Installing Windows 3.1 Video driver package

Windows Video Drivers

As it stands, Windows 3.1 will only support the PC110 display as a standard VGA display - that means 16 colours.You will have to install extra video drivers to get a decent 256 colour display. You have two choices for Windows 3.1 video drivers:

1. Install the downloadable Chips & Technologies drivers - which don't work; or
2. Install the drivers off the PC110 Utility Diskette - which work but give you Japanese fonts.

After some investigation, I have put together a new video driver installation package, which aims to take the benefits of both driver sets, and lose the drawbacks.

My driver package

This version provides the following features:

• Three video resolution / colour depth combinations are available:

640x480, 16 colours
640x480, 256 colours
800x600, 256 colours

• Large or small (normal) font size may be specified for any of the above;
• Large or small (normal) cursor size may be specified for any of the above;
• Standard fonts are retained;
• Panning support for 800x600 on the LCD is retained.

It is important to stress that I have not done anything to the driver code; as I am aware, this is simply a repackaged set of the 3.23 drivers, which are, of course, still the copyrighted property of Chips & Technologies, Inc. - I have simply rewritten most of the OEMSETUP.INF file to alter the available options and the way in which these driver files are installed.

Supported video modes

The following video modes are supporte by this package:

• 640x480, 16 colours, small (normal) fonts
• 640x480, 16 colours, large fonts
• 640x480, 256 colours, small (normal) fonts
• 640x480, 256 colours, large fonts
• 800x600, 16 colours (with 640x480 viewport and panning support when viewed on LCD), small (normal) fonts
• 800x600, 16 colours (with 640x480 viewport and panning support when viewed on LCD), large fonts

My PC110 tells me that my video BIOS does not support the following modes when I try to configure them:

• 800x600, 256 colours
• 1024x768, 16 colours

These video mode selections are therefore not supported by this package.

Installation of the drivers

You use these drivers at your own risk; if they screw up your system, I'm sorry. Run SETUP.EXE from the C:\WINDOWS directory whilst in DOS, and choose the VGA video option to reset your display.

Download BETA4W31.ZIP (153KB) and unpack it onto a diskette. Run Windows Setup and select the video option; go to the bottom of the list and choose Have disk..., and point it at the driver diskette. The twelve(!) available modes should be listed for you to choose from.

To keep the package small for downloading, I did not include all the usual files distributed with Win3.1 video drivers. These are things like VGAOEM.FON and VGALOGO.RLE - standard files which are either on the rest of your Windows diskettes, or very likely already on your hard drive. When installing the video drivers, if you get prompted for a Windows diskette, a good trick is to type in one of the following paths:

C:\WINDOWS
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM

It's not always obvious which of these it should be, so be prepared to enter both of them each time you are prompted for a Windows diskette. Also, watch out for when it really does need to look at the video driver diskette again; both of the above will be rejected, as you just need to point it at A:\ again.

Removal of previous versions of these (or other) drivers

If you've installed several sets of video drivers by now, you'll have a huge video driver selection list, as it remembers each set of drivers available off each diskette or set that you've tried. In order to simply remove these unwanted titles from the video driver list, follow these steps:

1. Edit your SYSTEM.INI file, look for the section [boot.description], and you should find an entry for displayinf, such as my current one:

displayinf=OEM9.INF

2. Now check in your C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory for files matching OEM*.INF - I've currently got the following ones:

OEM7.INF
OEM8.INF
OEM9.INF
OEM655xx.INF

3. I know (in my case) that OEM9.INF is the active one, so I have a quick look into each of the other OEM*.INF files to check that they are for previous installations of C&T 65535 drivers, and then just delete the files, leaving me with only OEM9.INF

Now when I run Windows Setup, and bring up the video selection list, I've lost all the old, unwanted, entries, and just have the standard entries plus the entries from my current driver file OEM9.INF. That's me happy!

Illustrations

Here's a couple of pictures to give you an idea of what the small/large font sizes are:
 

Control Panel, using small (normal) font size
Control Panel, using large font size

 
Personally, I prefer the larger font size, as it's more visible! As to the cursor size, well standard is 16 pixels, large is 32 pixels - the same height as an icon.

Feedback

Please tell me what you think of these drivers by dropping me a note. Thanks!
 
 

Written by Daniel Basterfield. Images found on the internet. Enjoy!