notsofossil wrote:

What kind of hardware would work ok with Windows 3.11? How hard is it to find drivers? Can I only use 486 or Pentium-era machines? I'd like to use a laptop over a desktop.

Anything 386 or above with 2MB ram and VGA will happily run win 3.11. You can even run it with the CGA driver from older versions if you really have ancient tech.

The drivers are going to boil down to Sound, video (if you want SVGA), and ethernet/modem. You'll have to do some research or post the laptops that interest you so we can try to track down drivers, but it really shouldn't be difficult. I always find the drivers I need for my desktop hardware, though I specifically go for 3com etherlink 3 cards if I want ethernet.

Since you're looking at laptops, the most interesting question will be sound in general. Typically only later 486 and then Pentium laptops will come with integrated sound blaster compatible sound. So I would be looking in that range.

Closest I have would be a Thinkpad i1400, not sure if the sound is completely soundblaster capable. It's a rather high end Pentium laptop, might be too much for Win3.11 but I'd rather not buy something else. Right now I have Win95 installed but it'd be nice to swap drives to do some tests and fun with Win3.11.

Then again maybe it'd be faster to ask something. Can Age of Empires run in WfW 3.11 using Win32s?

Aoe can't run on windows 3.1.

Either way, even a pentium 3 can run windows 3.1, some agp card still had drivers for it (some S3, ATi and early nvidia cards, etc.)

In my opinion, it's best to avoid running 3.1 on anything more modern than Socket7.

The slowest machine I've run Windows 3.1 on is a 12MHz 286 with 1MB RAM & 640x480 VGA graphics. That's good for running about 1 thing at a time very slowly. You don't want to go that low though, so the suggestions of 386 & above are good.

Personally, I think any flavour of 3.1 would be a waste on Pentium era hardware & above, unless your goal is to deliberately limit yourself software-wise. I tend to keep 3.1 for 386 class hardware and the low end 486s. Anything faster gets Windows 95 or above.

...or everything gets both of them 😊

(my socket 7 and socket 370 builds have both)

No version of Direct X works with 3.11. So that's just about every Win9x game out of the question.
But for simply having fun with, its a nice enough OS. I think of it more as a file manager and networking client for DOS on todays gaming machines.

I would say sound is most important. Not alot of difference between VGA or SVGA for the most part so the default vga driver is enough.
Sound doesn't really need dos support but WILL need Win3x drivers.

As far as motherboard, CPU's, RAM, all that low level stuff. Dos is responsible for that so as long as say Dos 6.22 runs so will windows

chinny22 wrote:

No version of Direct X works with 3.11. So that's just about every Win9x game out of the question. But for simply having fun wit […]
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No version of Direct X works with 3.11. So that's just about every Win9x game out of the question.
But for simply having fun with, its a nice enough OS. I think of it more as a file manager and networking client for DOS on todays gaming machines.

I would say sound is most important. Not alot of difference between VGA or SVGA for the most part so the default vga driver is enough.
Sound doesn't really need dos support but WILL need Win3x drivers.

As far as motherboard, CPU's, RAM, all that low level stuff. Dos is responsible for that so as long as say Dos 6.22 runs so will windows

As someone who ran Win3.1 well past it's sell-by date (1995-1999), I'd like to disagree with the "not a lot of difference between VGA and SVGA" - for games it's pretty irrelevant, but for any sort of desktop work, including the file manager, desktop real estate is key. 640x480 is a pain in the arse, regardless of number of colours. Even with a paltry 1MB video memory you can do 1024x768 at 256 colours, which is vastly better, or 800x600 at 16k colours, which looks good too.

There's no DirectX, but you can do its predecessors WinG and Win32s. A good game to showcase those in Battle Isle 3. CivNet was another early Windows game I thoroughly enjoyed in 3.1, and Civ2 also ran fine (I don't recall whether either needed WinG, but had it installed anyway).

BeginnerGuy wrote:

The drivers are going to boil down to Sound, video (if you want SVGA), and ethernet/modem.

This is spot on

Windows 3.11 is very unique, fun and nostalgic - it was also at the very start of the CD-ROM era, so there are compilation CDs out there with lots of windows 3.11 games that you can try.

I wouldn't bother trying to run windows 95/98 programs on it though

dionb wrote:

chinny22 wrote:

No version of Direct X works with 3.11. So that's just about every Win9x game out of the question. But for simply having fun wit […]
Show full quote

No version of Direct X works with 3.11. So that's just about every Win9x game out of the question.
But for simply having fun with, its a nice enough OS. I think of it more as a file manager and networking client for DOS on todays gaming machines.

I would say sound is most important. Not alot of difference between VGA or SVGA for the most part so the default vga driver is enough.
Sound doesn't really need dos support but WILL need Win3x drivers.

As far as motherboard, CPU's, RAM, all that low level stuff. Dos is responsible for that so as long as say Dos 6.22 runs so will windows

As someone who ran Win3.1 well past it's sell-by date (1995-1999), I'd like to disagree with the "not a lot of difference between VGA and SVGA" - for games it's pretty irrelevant, but for any sort of desktop work, including the file manager, desktop real estate is key. 640x480 is a pain in the arse, regardless of number of colours. Even with a paltry 1MB video memory you can do 1024x768 at 256 colours, which is vastly better, or 800x600 at 16k colours, which looks good too.

There's no DirectX, but you can do its predecessors WinG and Win32s. A good game to showcase those in Battle Isle 3. CivNet was another early Windows game I thoroughly enjoyed in 3.1, and Civ2 also ran fine (I don't recall whether either needed WinG, but had it installed anyway).

I would like to agree with your disagreement.
I always like WFW and always have at least one system running it. Maybe because it was my first PC, maybe because its the lack of a start menu, or maybe something else. I still prefer file manager to Windows explorer that came in with Win9x/NT4 in a lot of ways.

But if your just installing it for the first time to get a feel for it then I wouldn't worry about video card too much

PTherapist wrote:

The slowest machine I've run Windows 3.1 on is a 12MHz 286 with 1MB RAM & 640x480 VGA graphics. That's good for running about 1 thing at a time very slowly. You don't want to go that low though, so the suggestions of 386 & above are good.

As a long time 286 user, I had a similar experience. Though the most limiting factor isn't the 286 I think.
It's rather slow MFM/RLL hard drives and lack of memory. Slow 1 MiB of DIP/DIL memory works -and you can even go lower than that-,
but it is stressfully for both the 286 and Windows 3.1. 16-Bit Windows requires contiguous memory to work properly in my opinion.

If you have one megabyte, Window's memory managment has a lot to do. It has to move memory blocks and to change pointers for
code without having a pause for running actual program code. And that's for Windows only. Loading Windows applications
without virtual memory and constantly re-loading DLLs from disk is a tedious taks for the system. In additon, the 286 has no caches it
can rely on. Every piece of code has to be worked trough. If we consider all of this, 16-Bit Windows is a hacky but impressive little system.
In fact, it could in theory do virtual memory (minus hardware-assited "page to disk") on a 286, if Microsoft had cared a bit more about it.
With 4MiB of more, the system just flies and supports productive applications like MS Works, AutoSketch and Paintshop Pro. 😁
That's why the orginal Multimeda PC specs included a 286 once. It wasn't until the revised MPC 1.0 specs that a 386SX was the new minimum.
Pobably because it could run 386 Enhanced Mode and 32-Bit inlide code..

Personally, Windows 3.0 Real Mode was the most complex one. It had to work within 640K, but also supported large amounts of
Expanded Memory for both the system and Windows applications. And it supported not only one, but two flavors of EMS.
Normal, socalled Small-Frame EMS with four pages in a 64KiB window -and- Large-Frame EMS with a 256KiB window.
It also supported running active code in that frame, not only data. I think that's really impressive for such a patched-up "GUI".

PTherapist wrote:

Personally, I think any flavour of 3.1 would be a waste on Pentium era hardware & above, unless your goal is to deliberately limit
yourself software-wise. I tend to keep 3.1 for 386 class hardware and the low end 486s. Anything faster gets Windows 95 or above.

Well.. Yes, okay. Windows 3.1 runs fine on that, but I get your point. It can't make full use of the SS7 hardware.
But it's nice to have in a dual-boot scenario where you like to play old games or want to use special hardware you have 16-Bit drivers for (PC interfaces, toys, etc).
I loved to run my Hauppauge WinTV tuner card on a Pentium 75 w/ 16MB, for example.
I allowed me to use my old B/W tube camera with UHF output on my PC and to read news on Teletext. 😀
I also used it to record VHS movies in MPEG1 and to take screenshots of my old consoles on VGA (NES, Mastersystem).

Deksor wrote:

Aoe can't run on windows 3.1.

Either way, even a pentium 3 can run windows 3.1, some agp card still had drivers for it (some S3, ATi and early nvidia cards, etc.)

What are some examples of Win95 games that can work on Win3.11 using Win32s?

For the record I have a lot of games that can work on Win3.11, says so right on the packaging for them, so I'm not just after Win95 games on a more outdated OS.

notsofossil wrote:

What are some examples of Win95 games that can work on Win3.11 using Win32s?

For the record I have a lot of games that can work on Win3.11, says so right on the packaging for them, so I'm not just after Win95 games on a more outdated OS.

3D Space Cadet Pinball (found in Windows 95 (with Plus!) all the way up to XP) can run on Windows 3.1x with Win32s 1.30c. Here's a list of Win32s compatible software.

Windows NT 3.51 is another good choice you can look into, it has the Windows 3.x UI and is compatible with more software thanks to being a native 32-bit operating system. The only problem is finding drivers for your system, even if your hardware claims to have "Windows NT" drivers, they might not work with NT 3.x due to most NT drivers mainly being written for NT 4.0, the easiest way to tell if a driver will work with NT 3.51 is to check out the supplied readme file to see if it mentions NT 3.5x compatibility (for example: the Yamaha YMF-71x Windows NT audio driver is actually designed for both WIndows NT 3.5x and 4.0, so drivers that are compatible with each other do exist but they're not that common).

notsofossil wrote:

What are some examples of Win95 games that can work on Win3.11 using Win32s?

That's a though question. I would say it is best to go by release and production dates,
since the insane Windows 95 hype of the 90s caused Win 3.1 compatibility to be neglected.
Not on the technical side, but on the games package.
Back then, gigantic star-formed stickers in ugly signal colours proudly screamed "Works with Windows 95!",
"Windows 95 supported", "Windows 95 enhanced", "Now for Windows 95", "Windows 95 blah.. blah.. blah.." 😉
Windows 3.1 or NT was mentioned on the specs part, if at all. Usually on the underside or lower corner of the backside.
While it was still the most common Windows release, people of the time seemingly wanted erase 3.1 from their minds.
Maybe they did like the colour blue ? 😁

Win32 games released between 92-95 have a chance to run on Win32s, too.
The main problem is that every Win32s application is a valid Win32 application as well.

In some way or another, a Win32s application is even more conformable to the Win NT API, tha the average Win95 binary.
That's because Win32s sttarted out as a subset of Win32 (NT), not Win32c (Win95).
In addition, a Win32s EXE also contains relocation tables. They are handy for certain special cases and don't get in the way with Win95/NT.
On these platforms, they are simply ignored. However, they are handy for modern NT releases,
because the ability of self-relocation works hand-in-hand with modern mechanisms like NX-Bit/PAE/DEP.

Some random characteristics of a Win32s application:
- Relocation tables
- 16MB limit
- Not using Threading
- Not using modern GDI brushes
- 8+3 file names
- Using only Win 3.1/core NT Common Dialogs
- Not using DirectX

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

Windows NT 3.51 is another good choice you can look into, it has the Windows 3.x UI and is compatible with more software thanks to being a native 32-bit operating system..

NT 3.51 was a good OS, no question. Not as elegant and advanced as OS/2 Warp, of course, but good. 😉
Interestingly, there once was a Windows for Workgroups 3.11 vs Windows NT 3.x article (or author's comment).
Surprisingly, as it turned out, WfW 3.11 with enabled FastDisk and disk cache was higher (!) performing than NT.
Same did go for video speed. Windows 3.11 was much quicker here.
I once discoverd that amusing article in the huge shelves with archived issues of "Byte Magazine",
when I was in my city's public library and was searching for retro/vintage computing/vintage radio articles.

IBM thinkpad 380 with 166mhz pentium CPU and 32gb of ram and stock IBM travelstar 3gb. Hard-drive.
IBM provides drivers for DOS/3x/NT351/NT4/95/98 and more.

I have one running NT 351 for networking. Even surfs the net with PCMCIA ethernet 3com 3cxxxx card.

The display is not that great but it has a VGA port for external display. Uses a NeoMagic graphics.

These IBM thinkpads provide the best support for DOS and Win3x.

https://thinkpads.com/support/Thinkpad-Driver … t/ddfm/380.html

You can find these for about $100 on eBay. Most of the time they just need a NEW CMOS battery.
Make sure you get one with a built in CDROM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD9axfmUNqs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWGOLO5HTDs&t=1137s