.. also interesting is MicroMan's WAP (Windows Animation Package)..

"Perhaps unusually for a piece of Windows 3.x software, MicroMan is a fully-animated platform game complete with sound effects.
Back in the pre-OpenGL/DirectX days, developers wishing to make a Windows game had to resort to doing
without anything vaguely resembling smooth animation or advanced multimedia while putting up
with a haphazard mess of APIs that didn't allow direct access to hardware,
or write something from scratch to alleviate the situation. "

Source: http://www.andrewturnbull.net/microman.html

It even ran on my 286 in Windows Standard Mode, if memory serves. WinG couldn't do that, for example.

Speaking of WinDirect, I got it working in the past. Very interesting to tinker with.
Some pictures attached.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-12-09, 15:21:

Speaking of WinDirect, I got it working in the past. Very interesting to tinker with.
Some pictures attached.

I got it working somewhat with OTVDM. Didn't expect that it was working fine, but with the 3 screenshots you shared, it was the same.

On a different note, I wonder if the 4bit color mode was only available in VBE and not in other forms of exclusive GDI/DirectX palettes.

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2023-12-09, 15:35:

Jo22 wrote on 2023-12-09, 15:21:

Speaking of WinDirect, I got it working in the past. Very interesting to tinker with.
Some pictures attached.

I got it working somewhat with OTVDM. Didn't expect that it was working fine, but with the 3 screenshots you shared, it was the same.

On a different note, I wonder if the 4bit color mode was only available in VBE and not in other forms of exclusive GDI/DirectX palettes.

Hi again, I've just tried out 4-Bit option. It seems to do something, but I'm not sure if the colours are all right.
Tested in DOSBox (Win 3.1+S3 drivers), with the 800x600 4-Bit option being selected in the test program.
Unfortunately, this doesn't really answer our questions, I suppose. 🤷

On a side note, though, there's a 4-Bit palettized VGA driver that supports color-cycling.
It was meant to be used with an older Windows versions, but seems to work fine in Windows 3.1x, as well.
So there's sort of a way of getting palette-based 4-Bit colours modes via GDI.

Edit: I had a hard time fighting with the picture upload feature.
It didn't like small PNGs (below ~10 KB), rejected even some of my GIFs (one, ~4KB, made using excellent WinGIF!).