The "Megabuild" on my homepage (button below) supports 1280x1024.

Hi Hal,

Thanks a lot, it works like a charm! 😁 😁

Hugo

Hi Hal!

I run Windows 3.11 in Linux + Dosbox, because I still use an old program that doesn't work in Wine. It's a sort of spread sheet calculator, that can import images into the pages. In order to print I installed a postscript printer inside the fake Windows installation and later I use CUPS (Linux printing system) to print those pages. This works pretty well.

Until know the biggest desktop screen I could use in Dosbox/Windows was 1024x768, which is a bit too small for the program mentioned above.

I downloaded the package from your page, compiled it on my Linux machine and it works nearly perfect: now I can switch the windows desktop to 1280x1024 (256 colors), but if I do this, I can't print images any more. Whenever I try to print a page that contains an imported jpg, bmp or gif image, the only thing I see is a black rectangle where the image is supposed to be.

As soon as I switch back to 1024x768 (64k colors) printing behaves normal again.

Reducing the images to 256 colors doesn't help: the black rectangle remains as soon as I use a bigger desktop than 1024x768.

The images a not only black when printing, but also in printing preview.

Do you know if this is the result of the fact that the bigger desktop screen uses only 256 colors or if I have to install some more patches to the dosbox source code? Or is there some software I have to install inside Windows 3.11?

Many thanks in advance for any help.

Did you set the memory size in dosbox.conf to maximum already? If that doesn't help, maybe booting DOS in DOSBox and running Win3.11 in there would. My guess is that Windows runs low on memory...

I set memsize=256 now, but that doesn't change anything. (This amount of memory should really be enough for Win 3.11. Just imagine what 256MB would have meant on a computer when Windows 3 was state of the art. 😉 )

if that doesn't help, maybe booting DOS in DOSBox and running Win3.11 in there would.

Do you mean installing DOS 6 within Dosbox?

1) DOSBox do not support more than memsize=63.
2) Yes/No. You need an HD-image with MS-DOS and Win3.11 on. Then you boot that in DOSBox. Exactly how you create such an image is beyond my knowledge.

Thanks for your answers so far.

Well, if I dig deep enough in my desk and all my chests and boxes I might still find some DOS floppy disks. Only trouble is: my PC doesn't have a floppy disk drive any more.

I think I will try FreeDos first, before I search for the old floppy disks and someone who can copy them onto a media I can use on my machine. If all fails, I will have to live with 1024x768 again. After all: I really am glad that Dosbox exists, because without it I couldn't use any old program at all!

Ups! I just found out that the problem has nothing to do with the size of the virtual desktop, but with the amount of colors: if I switch to 1024x768 with just 256 colors, I also get black rectangles instead of images.

I am using the s3 driver. Does this ring any bell?

You can try the Tseng chipsets emulated by DOSBox (you need to change your dosbox.conf to use them).

Also you'll need to load the 3.11 drivers for them as well.

They may possible give you more than 256 colors at 1280.

Only S3 supports more than 256 colors.

After sleeping this issue over I am still trying to understand what is actually causing the images to be replaced by black rectangles. I am not very good when it comes to hardware drivers and stuff like that, so please forgive my stupid questions. I just want to understand what is going on there.

I understand that an image with millions of colours cannot be displayed correctly on a desktop that's capable of only 256 colors: there will be lots of glitches and artefacts and the picture simply will look very ugly. I've seen these effects a lot of times. That would explain why the images are just black rectangles when I use printing preview. But it does not explain why it makes no difference if the images are reduced to 256 colours and it certainly does not explain to me why the printer driver can't handle the images, regardless what colour depth.

Inside the Dosbox + Windows I use a postscript printer from Adobe, that is set to print into a file. When I look at the files later using Ghostview on my Linux, there are still just black rectangles where the images are supposed to be. (My Linux desktop is set to 32bpp.)

Is this just the fault of the Windows' policy "What you see is what you get", meaning, in the end, that you cannot get anything that you cannot see? Is Windows telling the printer driver not to print anything that the user can't see on the desktop?

Or is it really the combination of Dosbox and Windows that's causing the blackening of the images after all?

Again: please don't get me wrong! I am not trying to sue the developers of Dosbox there, I just like to understand it and see, if there is still something I could try, e.g. another printer driver, another VGA driver, or so on.

I just tried a little trick: In my build the emulated graphics card has enough memory to display 1280x1024 at 64k colors. That mode can't be selected from the menu probably because the pixel frequency was too much for the real hardware (emulated hardware is patient here 😉 )
Open the system.ini in your Windows 3.11 directory and change the values under [DISPLAY]:
color-format=16
screen-size=1280

(you could try 1600 too if you can make use of it, there is just enough video memory for that mode)

Now start your Windows and have a 1280x1024 64k colors desktop. I tried with the S3 864 1.41B5 driver but it could work for others too.

Hal, that trick of yours is great: it works! 😁 I can print again using the large desktop. Hurrah!

You see, the trouble is: my eyesight is not as good as it used to be and I need to set the desktop to 1280 and large fonts, otherwise I'll get a bad headache even if I wear my specs. Thanks to your trick I can finally relax in front of the screen again.

Just to let you know: if I try to set screen-size=1152 in system.ini and start Dosbox I get a large number of lines saying

1Illegal write to 1800000, CS:IP      217:    2d7c
2Illegal write to 1800001, CS:IP      217:    2d7c
3Illegal write to 1800002, CS:IP      217:    2d7c
4Illegal write to 1800003, CS:IP      217:    2d7c
5...

and so on, up to

1...
2Illegal write to 18003e4, CS:IP      217:    2d7c
3Illegal write to 18003e5, CS:IP      217:    2d7c
4Illegal write to 18003e6, CS:IP      217:    2d7c
5Illegal write to 18003e7, CS:IP      217:    2d7c

I am sure this makes much more sense to you than it makes to me. 😉

Now I am curios: did you code any wide screen modes into your megabuild? If not: are you planing to do so? A 1600x1000 desktop would surely be the icing! 😎

There's a 1280x800 VESA mode coded in there but I don't know if Windows could be convinced to use it... You can use it with Quake though xD (way too slow)

The driver is probably not made for the 1152x864 resolution with more than 256 colors. There's no commented-out entry in oemsetup.inf 😉