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Paintbrush zoom-in problem on Win95

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First post, by Andrew T.

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Earlier this month, I was able to successfully get my Windows 95 system up and running again after a hard drive crash. Today, however, I stumbled upon a small but annoying problem.

When running the Windows 3.1 Paintbrush accessory (not Windows 95 Paint) and using the View > Zoom In feature, the entire composition in the editing window becomes black. Meanwhile, the gridlines that should be black appear in the actual colours of the composition. When drawing pixels onto the screen from this zoomed-in view, the squares "fill in" with the selected colour...until you scroll, when they become black again.

I've been using Windows 95 for over 20 years and Paintbrush for over 25, and I've never run into this problem before. My first guess was that this was an incompatibility issue with the GDI system files an unofficial "service pack" had installed, but reverting these to known-good versions from my previous Win95 installation made no difference.

I've always vastly preferred Paintbrush to Paint, and part of the reason why I specifically maintain a Windows 95 system in the first place is because it's capable of running Paintbrush perfectly! Paintbrush is a finicky accessory, and newer NT-based OSes aren't capable of using its colour eraser tool.

Any ideas?

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Reply 1 of 5, by Andrew T.

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And, a quick update:

When troubleshooting a few minutes ago, I accidentally discovered that this problem happens only when my display is set to a colour depth of 16-bit or higher. If I step down to 256 colours (regardless of resolution), the problem doesn't happen and Paintbrush behaves normally.

This would seem to indicate that this is a problem with my Compaq/ATI OEM video driver, strange as that would be.

Reply 2 of 5, by Jo22

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Hi! Yes, this could be well an issue of the graphics drivers or some Windows component.
I used to have some issues with WinG and Hi-Color modes in Win 9x, too. See Re: Uses for Each Windows

As a workaround, if you like, you can use the Paintbrush from Windows NT 3.x, it is a 32-Bit program but was compiled from the same source as Win 3.1 Paintbrush.
Other than that, there's also ZSoft Paintbrush, which MS Paintbrush (not MS Paint) was originally based on.

Good luck! 😀

Jo22

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 3 of 5, by Andrew T.

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IIRC, neither NT Paintbrush nor any of the 32-bit NT 3.51 accessories work on Windows 9x. Microsoft compiled them to use NT-specific APIs before Win32 had become stabilized.

Upon investigation, I discovered that I was using version 4.10.2307 of the ATI Rage driver. On my previous Windows installation, I was using version 4.11.2573...so evidently ATI fixed some things between 4.10 and 4.11!

Simply copying the "better" 4.11 driver files to the Windows\System folder didn't work, however: Windows barfed on boot if I did that. And of course, I can't find my original setup file for the 4.11 version of the driver!

After snooping around the Compaq FTP, I found this download which turned out to be an intermediate 4.10.2466 version. At first glance, this seemed to do the trick! Paintbrush still gets visually corrupted on the zoom-in, though...though now the problem is errant pixels in the uppermost rows of the visible portion of the window.

Reply 4 of 5, by Andrew T.

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And, yet another update...

While Googling for a 4.11 version of the driver, I found this download. I gave it a try...and it worked! Paintbrush now behaves properly. Maybe there are other problems left to be discovered, but I haven't found them yet. And now I can draw like it's 1995. 😎

Reply 5 of 5, by Jo22

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Andrew T. wrote:

IIRC, neither NT Paintbrush nor any of the 32-bit NT 3.51 accessories work on Windows 9x.
Microsoft compiled them to use NT-specific APIs before Win32 had become stabilized.

Ah, i see. I totally forgot about that old NT Native-API. It was there among the Win32, Posix and OS/2 API.
I guess I thought it would run since NTVDM with the WoW sub-system runs atop Win32 API..

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

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