Great news... Do they really work? Up to now there were no drivers running with W3.1 in DOSBOX with more than 16 colors (well, one of developers had some experimental support for 256 colors, but unfortunately the design was not compatible with the things implemented in DOSBOX).

Anyway: These things concern next version (not 0.61 !). So please do not start here any long discussion of running W3.x in DOSBOX - developers do not like it (it concerns next version and additionaly any support for Windows 3.x is at moment just a pleasant sideeffect - main task of DOSBOX is to run DOS games).

Mirek

yes they work, I'm playing Colonization for Win3.1 on the DOSbox 0.61 that also includes the MT32 emulation. It's clearly using 256 colors, because it looks much prettier than with the standard drivers 😀

No, I tried it on a few days old CVS build and it does not work (which driver did you try - SVGA 640*480 256 colors?). There was an error (Error loading SVGA256.DRV).
MT-32 builds are done by CANADACOW, which was the person who experimented with adding support for 256 colors in W31. So it is quite possible that the build contains that code.
Unfortunately it is not a part of normal CVS (DOSBOX supports a different graphic card then CANADACOW implemented). In short: it will not work with any officiall version.

I will be glad if somebody proves me wrong but I think that there is no way to run W3.1 in 256 colors in any officiall version or current CVS builds.

Mirek

doh 🙁

well, at least it might be of use to other people running the DOSbox version I use, since this was the only driver I could get to work, and I did try a few, which all crashed or produced garbage.

It's possible you're using an Oak Driver because Canadacow rewrote the graphics code in his builds to a different Graphics Card (Oak I believe) be more supportive for higher color counts but since he's been "quite" busy lately not much of his code is probably going to enter into DOSBox any time soon. Namely MT32 (Roland squashed that) and Oak Card (I don't know why... but i don't think he will.)

the video card in the dosbox version I'm using is being reported as S3 Trio 64 by some VESA utility ...however I couldn't get Trio drivers to work with Windows.

btw, I hope this does belong to this forum and I'm not posting something that doesn't belong here. because I just found those forums a few days ago

to get higher modes running using the s3 vga drivers hardware accelaration is needed (win3.1 uses it) That part is missing from dosbox.

We haven't added Oak emulation because the Oak card is technically inferior to the S3 video card. On the other hand, I implemented it in my version because I am both very familiar with the Oak implementation and its also one of the simplest SVGA implementations out there.

priestlyboy wrote:

Namely MT32 (Roland squashed that) and Oak Card (I don't know why... but i don't think he will.)

What about Roland and the MT-32? I thought they found out they didn't have a leg to stand on, so their demands were no longer an issue? Or did I misunderstand?

let's say they don't want to help providing documentation 😉

Mikity wrote:

What about Roland and the MT-32? I thought they found out they didn't have a leg to stand on, so their demands were no longer an issue? Or did I misunderstand?

They maintain that they are right, they are just unable to find some documents proving that the ROM is copyrighted. If MT-32 was added to normal DOSBOX and then they would find some documents and decided to be nasty it could lead to big problems. Search VOGONS for more details.

Mirek