S3VBE20 enhances VBE support on S3 cards and enables some features.
Another utility, enables linear framebuffer.
http://files.mpoli.fi/unpacked/hardware/displ … zip/s3spdup.htm
Not exactly relevant to Windows 3.1x, though.😅

The difference between S3 Trio64 and 64V(+) is DRAM vs VRAM. Trio64V2 added bilinear filtering. The 64 refers to the memory bandwidth (64-Bit).
The Trio series is (was) the successor to the S3 Vision series.
It integrated three separate ICs into one.
Software-wise they should behave pretty much the same.

Edit: The Himem.sys that ships with MS-DOS 5/6.2x and Windows 3.1x didn't support more than 64MB of RAM. On hardware that was considered "normal".
There's an /EISA switch worth to try. Not sure if it works with PCI machines. 🤷‍♂️

https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/116/Q116256/

Edit: If the memory issuu persists, I really recommend trying QEMM 7 to 9.
It was the only memory manager that was capable of running properly in my VirtualBox VMs.
It managed to provide EMS etc. even though the emulated chipset was blocking all memory regions.

Edit: Not sure if that's useful information, but from what I remember..
Himem.sys/EMM386 from MS-DOS allocates memory upwards from bottom to the "sky",
whereas their counterparts from Windows 9x DOS do the other way round.

Maybe that's useful in conjunction with cache memory and the "cacheable area".
Memory past 64MB may not be cached if the capacity of the cache is too little.
Maybe that's also why Windows 95 seemed so slow to Windows 3.1 back then, bay comparison, not sure.

QEMM 9 got the full 128mb showing now, and also got me to a crazy 634kb free of conventional.

Haven’t tried the other driver version or the TSR yet, but this is fun progress.

Okay, tried the new drivers, no difference. All color depths work, but 16.7M gives the extremely low memory error.

Sunoo wrote on 2022-04-07, 11:29:

Okay, not sure what I changed, I looked at virtual memory, but don’t think I changed any settings. However, now it works in every resolution and every color depth with the exception of 16.7M colors (which I wouldn’t use anyways). So I guess I’m good?

Thanks for the help troubleshooting.

I realise that you might not remember now, but did you by any chance uninstall anything? You might have reduced the number of icons requiring conversion.

I hit this in Bochs with an emulated Cirrus 5446 card and did some testing and unsurprisingly it seems like changing the colour depth triggers this issue but not the resolution.

https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/082/Q82333/ covers this particular error message and notes that sometimes you actually need to reduce the number of icons in a program group to fix it!

If you have abnormally large groups, you may have to split the group into two or more separate groups to comply with the 64K lim […]
Show full quote

If you have abnormally large groups, you may have to split the group into two or
more separate groups to comply with the 64K limit for a Program Manager group.
The size restriction of 64K includes information for each program item,
including icon color information.

When you change from a 16 color display driver (4bpp such as VGA or super VGA) or
a 256 color (8bpp such as 8514 or v7vga) to a 16bpp or greater display card, the
groups must be smaller to accommodate the additional color information for each
program item.

If you do the workaround they suggest to fix the black, unconverted icons:

1. Choose the program item with a black icon.

2. From the File menu, choose Properties, or press ALT+ENTER.

3. Choose the OK button.

it seems like if the group is too big, it just says it can't do it, and then the icon disappears, so you can just do this over and over until there are no more black icons. I did this at 24 bit colour depth and ended up with only 19 icons in my Borland C++ 4.52 group, down from the 35 it installed initially. I guess that's their definition of an "abnormally large" group! Maybe it doesn't help that that group had some long command lines for some of these icons.

I found that if I did the install when it was already in a higher colour depth, the install simply didn't create as many icons, but didn't report an error, which is pretty disappointing!

doshea wrote on 2022-08-20, 03:29:

I realise that you might not remember now, but did you by any chance uninstall anything? You might have reduced the number of icons requiring conversion.

I can’t say for sure, because it’s been a while, but I don’t recall having uninstalled anything around then.

There is a KB article addressing this problem:
https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/082/Q82333/
A program manager has a 64k limit for a program group, when converting icons, it runs out of memory when converting to 16bit or 24bit.