Try Display Doctor, it might work.

https://archive.org/details/scitechdoctor

1200XL M.U.L.E. wrote on 2023-11-05, 03:48:

I picked up a Dell Optiplex GX620 from my county dump. It was destined for electronics recycling! I decided to make this into so […]
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I picked up a Dell Optiplex GX620 from my county dump. It was destined for electronics recycling! I decided to make this into some sort of super-duper DOS/Windows machine. This machine has a 2.8GHz Pentium D processor and 4GB of RAM. Nice!

It also has a Nvidia FX3500 video card. A quick Google search for Windows 3.11 drivers came up with nothing, as expected.

But, is there a set of generic drivers that could offer 32k or more colors?

Or, do I need to downgrade my card to something older here? The machine does have PCI slots.

Thanks!

AFAIK, there aren't any generic SVGA drivers that supports more than 256 colors. Downgrading the video card to something period correct would help as these ones have drivers supporting GUI acceleration in addition to higher color depths.

Regardless, more than 256 colors are quite problematic with some Windows 3.x games.

dominusprog wrote on 2023-11-05, 12:31:

Try Display Doctor, it might work.

https://archive.org/details/scitechdoctor

SDD doesn't support adequately the Quadro video card nor provides generic drivers for Windows 3.x.

Thanks for the link to Display Doctor! I gave v5 and v6 a try. Neither detected the card but I was able to run most of the tests with linear memory addressing. Banked memory addressing would crash the system. To its credit, DD did detect a VBE v3 interface.

I also tried using a set of SVGA drivers I downloaded from WinworldPC. None of them worked.

Lastly, I tried all of this again with another video card I had but completely forgot about - an ATI All In Wonder 128 PCI. Same results.

It looks like all of my video cards are too new for Windows 3.1. I was thinking last night that I should break down and install Windows 95 on this machine but that kind of feels like surrender. 😆

Ive got a quadro 280 working in windows 3.11 which is a little older (fx 5200 spec) but only in 256 colours using this driver, tried googling for it to provide a link but two of the links I tried didnt work.

Theres no proper drivers for anything newer then a tnt2 by nvidia for win 3.x, it would be a massive downgrade though to goto a s3 virge or similar, Guess it depends what you plan on using the pc for,

sneeker wrote on 2023-11-05, 17:49:

it would be a massive downgrade though to goto a s3 virge or similar

Only regarding 3D capabilities, those cards have good 2D performance (just stay away from the noname ones) and some of its contemporaries have VBE 2.0 onboard out of the box.

sneeker wrote on 2023-11-05, 17:49:

Theres no proper drivers for anything newer then a tnt2 by nvidia for win 3.x, it would be a massive downgrade though to goto a s3 virge or similar, Guess it depends what you plan on using the pc for,

...unfortunately, these TNT/TNT2 drivers are very unstable, with font corruption bugs and DCI not working, so I recommend to stay away from NVidia TNT and later cards if Win3.x performace is important.

Way too new hardware..

Okay, technically, it would be possible to hack the existing SVGA drivers to use higher VBE modes (driver has native chipset routines and VBE as fallback).

But in practice, using a more modern "Program-Manager Windows" like Windows NT 3.51 or a Windows 95 beta (earlier Chicago builds) might be more practical.

I mean, sure, Windows 3.x can run on just fine on that PC.
The basic PC compatibility is provided, after all.
X86 processor, ISA memory map, AT BIOS, VGA graphics with VGA BIOS w/ VESA VBE addition etc..

If you want to make this computer a DOS or early windows machine you should consider a processor downgrade.
Neither DOS nor Windows 3.x nor Windows 9x support more than 1 CPU core.
What's more, Pentium D processors are known for their high power consumption and excessive heat.
Even worse - those OSes doesn't support any power saving features so CPU is working all the time at maximum level even "doing nothing".

I'd suggest 65W TDP Cedar Mill Celeron. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_I ... 22_(65_nm)
You can buy them very cheap (pay attention to sSPEC number - D0 are 65W, C1 are 86W).

Well, technically there *is* a 386 Enhanced-Mode driver for Windows 3.1 that issues HLT command..

http://win16.info/files/patch/WQGHLT/

"What is WQGHLT
==============

WQGHLT is a CPU load reduction tool for Windows 3.1x. It is implemented
as a Windows 3.1x VxD that installs an idle handler that issues the HLT
instruction in ring 0."

But, of course, it's not fine tuned. It's meant for VMs in first place, so a single 3.1 VM won't hog the host.
It will halt the CPU during idling, then let it go up to 100% again if there's load.
There's no dynamic up clocking/down clocking as with Windows XP/Vista, I mean.

Wow, thanks for all the replies, everyone! 😀

I am now understanding how this computer is too modern for a true DOS/Windows experience. Downgrading or modifying this machine would be a serious project because Dell used a lot of proprietary connections, baffles, mounts, etc. I would rather use the time and money to work on a more generic machine.

Like I said, I picked up this machine from the local dump where it was placed with other electronics (like broken stereos and LCD screens) to be recycled.

Now I am thinking I will fill it up with SATA drives, install Ubuntu, and give it away locally or sell it on eBay. Give it a new home.

you can always patch the 256color wfw driver for vesa support of your gfx-card the very latest win3 driver that supports full 16M color is Matrox G450/550 within OS/2 Warp4 (WinOS/2). Works great even in OS/2 Desktop for the Win3 Apps.

1200XL M.U.L.E. wrote on 2023-11-07, 15:37:

I am now understanding how this computer is too modern for a true DOS/Windows experience.

Well, in theory, Windows 3.1x is very forgiving by nature.
If someone wrote a matching driver, Windows 3.1x would handle it very well. 🙂

Resolution of 1600x1200 and up are no issue. With the appropriate driver, 16:9 resolutions or 4k might be possible.

It's just that development of Windows 3.x had ended in the 90s, pretty much.
Ok, a few things were being developed up to late 2000s, still, maybe.
That's when WfW 3.11 was retired (Nov 1st, 2008).

PS: Here's an article from OS/2 Museum about a newly written (hacked) Windows graphics driver.

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/windows-3-x-vddvga/

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/antique-display-driving/