Vague question. What video card are you trying to get to work?

Intersting topic! As oeuvre said, what are you trying to accomplish ?
Besides, I wonder if this is possible at all. If my memory serves, Win95 added a lot of stuff to the Win16 API
that's not to be found in Windows 3.x. I'm thinking of GDI in particular. Bezier curves are not supported in the older Windows, for example.
So then what happens with GDI acceleration, if the 9x graphics drivers supports it ?
Is it just ignored or does it cause trouble ?

There are some gfx-cards that support win9x and win3x as well.

- Matrox up to G400 (AGP-Card)
- Nvidia Riva128, TNT and TNT2 also support Win3x beside Win9x
- 3dfx Voodoo3 (but very slow)

more here: http://www.win31.de/edrivers.htm

But most cards could be patched to support Win3x and 256colors. I have tested a GF6-6200 and a GF3-Ti200.
http://download.wcnews.com/files/other/wcpc/svgaptch.zip
(But there are some issues)

1About svgaptch: This tool should patch svga256.drv to make it VESA compliant. Svga256.drv is a 256 color video driver included in WfW 3.11 with support for special graphics chipsets only. 
2
3To install do:
4
5 1. copy svga256.drv in the directory where svgaptch.exe is located 
6 2. enter "svgaptch -p". It should display some messages what it has done.
7 3. copy the patched svga256.drv back to the windows 3.1 system directory.
8 4. with setup.exe in windows directory select one of the super vga 256-color modes.

oeuvre wrote:

Vague question. What video card are you trying to get to work?

Well not any particular graphics card. I'm searching for any possible graphics card that had both Win 3.X/9X drivers and if there was a particular card during the cut off period that branched into pure 9X on the borderline those might be the last generation graphics cards that could be hacked modified to run on 3.X. The same could be possible adapting 3.X graphics card to 9X just like some XP cards that lost 9X driver support could be modified to work if there were on the edge of driver compatibility possibility but not done by the manufacturer.

dr.zeissler wrote:

There are some gfx-cards that support win9x and win3x as well. […]
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There are some gfx-cards that support win9x and win3x as well.

- Matrox up to G400 (AGP-Card)
- Nvidia Riva128, TNT and TNT2 also support Win3x beside Win9x
- 3dfx Voodoo3 (but very slow)

We need more of these borderline cards listed. I might be able to try and hack some of these that ran on PCI so they can be used on modern systems that still have PCI slots.

Anyone know of any exclusive Windows 3.X games titles that don't work in 9X?

95DosBox wrote:

Anyone know of any exclusive Windows 3.X games titles that don't work in 9X?

Not right now, but I heard some Win32s games were more stable on.. well.. Win32s (which was an Windows 3.1 extension).
I think Creatures! was one of them. Real Windows 3.1 allowed for a larger heap-size for Win16/Win32s programs.

Another thing is the orginal WinTrek game. Its status window was unreadable in Win95.

And there were "desktop toys" like Sheep, Horse or Elvis detector which didn't like the taskbar.
Oh, and Windows 2.x games of curse. They sometimes used the older bitmap format Win 9x can't read.

But that was only a problem if they ran at all. Win9x refuses to run Win16 apps which didn't
have their "Windows 3.0 aware" bit set in the NE header. But that's all, really.

Provided that the games aren't speed-sensitive, of course.

Wait!, now that I'm thinking about it.. The older QuickTime 2.x, which early VR titles like Myst used,
didn't work so well on Win95 I heard. But that's not so much of an issue, I think.

Myst, for example, was also ported to Windows95 and Macintosh.
So there's no reason to play the Win 3.1 version, because someone could play the Mac version using Executor.

By the way, wasn't WinG officially deprecated in Windows 98FE ? I once ran it in later 9xes, but dithering wasn't pretty there.
While Windows 3.1 in 256col/24bit-colour mode or Windows XP's WoW in true-colour mode, worked just fine.

😉

Colonization for Windows original release wasn't so stable on 9x, the 95 patch fixed it somewhat but it remains more stable and less crash happy on 3.1 than on 9x.