Creating Windows 3.1-compatible BMP files \ VOGONS

Creating Windows 3.1-compatible BMP files

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First post, by zerker

Posted on 2016-03-02, 23:56

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I've installed Windows 3.1 on one of my Retro Machine's compact flash cards, and I am running into a strange issue: I can't seem to convert any of my desktop wallpapers to a BMP file that is compatible with Windows 3.1!

I've done a bit of research, and found out that there have been several different revisions of the BMP file format, but I'm using a tool (imagemagick) that is supposed to be able to handle this. E.g. "convert image.jpg -format bmp3 image.bmp".

I know that Windows 3.1 only supports 4, 8 or 24-bit color images, but I have tested both 24 and 8 bit images without any success.

Is anyone else doing this, and have you found something that works?

Reply 1 of 10, by leileilol

Posted on 2016-03-03, 00:16

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Sounds like a Imagemagick bug which i'm not really surprised given how bloaty and regressive that thing is

I'd suggest converting your pictures with something else, like say Irfanview, ACDSEE, Pain Shop Pro, Microsoft Pain, etc.

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Reply 2 of 10, by keenmaster486

Posted on 2016-03-03, 02:56

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leileilol wrote:
Pain Shop Pro, Microsoft Pain, etc.

Was that intentional?

Because if it was I guess I can see that.

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Reply 3 of 10, by collector

Posted on 2016-03-03, 08:02

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Or a broken 't'.

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Reply 4 of 10, by gdjacobs

Posted on 2016-03-03, 09:15

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Nope, he spelled it right.

PSP 3.11 on your Win 3.1 machine is the answer.

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Reply 5 of 10, by dr_st

Posted on 2016-03-03, 09:39

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Trivia: For legacy-compatibility reasons, Microsoft Paint can be started on all recent versions of Windows not only as "mspaint" but also as "pbrush".

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Reply 6 of 10, by Joey_sw

Posted on 2016-03-03, 11:34

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win 3.x paint brush did have a useful feature (for me, subjectively speaking) that conveniently omitted since win95 mspaint.
i remember I have to copy to win3.x pbrush to win95 because of it.

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Reply 7 of 10, by leileilol

Posted on 2016-03-03, 12:51

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i've only seen dithered spraying as more useful in pbrush since it made for a decent shading tool. Still miss the stretched interface though

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Reply 8 of 10, by Davros

Posted on 2016-03-03, 19:17

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I could be wrong here but were win 3.1 bitmaps RLE ? run length encoded ?

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Reply 9 of 10, by leileilol

Posted on 2016-03-03, 19:28

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They had a dedicated .RLE extension for those IIRC

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Reply 10 of 10, by zerker

Posted on 2016-03-03, 21:45

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Well, I actually figured out the problem with imagemagick. Instead of:

1convert image.jpg -format bmp3 image.bmp

I should have been doing

1convert image.jpg BMP3:image.bmp

Thanks for the suggestions though 😀

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