Just a quick update.
Windows 95 cannot work with hercules graphics at all.
But it does work with EGA graphics, which is converted on hardware level to digital (TTL) out by the ATI VGA Wonder+ card.
I read a couple of references that it's "painful", but honestly it's workable and definitely not more painful than the original 640 (or 720) by 350px HGC mode on Windows 3.1 etc.
Of course it's immediately obvious that most of the software is not designed to be used in such low vertical resolution and there is MUCH software that you cannot even install without a VGA compatible display. For this software, all you need is to switch to standard VGA driver and power on the computer with an analogue monitor connected to the ATI card (it's compatible with both and auto configures itself on power on), install the "VGA" software and then revert to TTL/EGA and try running it. Most of the time it works, except of course for most of the VGA-requiring games.

Honestly the VGA Wonder works wonders, it's like magic that no configuration is needed. Just plug the needed type of monitor before powering up the machine.
I ended up combining it with a Pentium-200 based system so I can finally listen to my winAMP mp3 playlists on Windows 95 on the amber 12" monitor. 😀
I completely forgot to take any pictures, but I shall take and update this thread a couple of weeks later.

Now I need to figure out a way to make Windows 98 work with the ATi VGA Wonder+ with 640x480@256colors on the VGA analogue output. Default driver allows me only 16 colors and choosing 256 colors is only available on resolution 800x600.

I checked a Microsoft TechNet CD from 1997 and couldn't find anything saying whether Hercules should work with Windows 95. I expected to maybe find something saying it's not supported, but didn't.

doshea wrote on 2024-09-21, 12:54:

I checked a Microsoft TechNet CD from 1997 and couldn't find anything saying whether Hercules should work with Windows 95. I expected to maybe find something saying it's not supported, but didn't.

It's clearly stated on the box that VGA is required:

It's impossible to install from scratch without VGA - the installation program runs in a VGA mode 12h.

Nevertheless, Windows 9x can use some drivers made for Windows 3.x, eg. the EGA driver.
I saw some report about using it with Hercules as well, but I don't know any details...

I can confirm that the installation run fine while upgrading from windows 3.1 using the already installed EGA driver.
But it didn't work if using Hercules driver. And I've not seen any proof that someone managed to get 9x working with Hercules graphics.
Also, it's amazing how slowly the GUI is drawn with EGA on the ATi VGA Wonder+, even combined with a Pentium 233 CPU. 😀

I've also uploaded a video, you can watch it here. Enjoy!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HsASwnWbjPKL … ew?usp=drivesdk
It's amazing how it can produce some shades of amber on a digital monitor.

I might have seen Win95 on a Hercules mono standard monitor one time, I might have not. Twice in the 90s I went to use an ATM (Cash Machine) and found it crashed, one time, around 1995 or so, it was hung on the Windows 3.x loading screen, and it was sharp and correctly positioned, don't think it had shades, looked much like when I ran 3.1 on mono monitor in hercules mode... then a few years later, maybe 99, I again found an ATM crashed... the ATM hardware looked very similar to the first one, and the customer interface had not changed much, so it could all have been the same hardware, apart from CPU/Motherboard upgrades, or it may not have been. However in that instance it was crashed to a Win95 desktop but it was at least 4x normal size, like the start button took a 1 inch by 2 inch block of the screen approx, and was distorted and you could see scan and flyback lines. Just the sort of thing you would expect when some 31khz or higher signal is trying to go into a 15-18khz capable tube.

Now, I don't know if a driver had disappeared or corrupted and Win95 was meant to be showing through like that, the normal ATM customer interface did not look very graphical, it looked very text mode terminal-ish. So I am not sure if the way they did it needed a windows driver to be operating the customer interface, or whether it fullscreened a terminal or DOS session. Anyway, I would go digging in the Point of Sale and ATM type portions of the internet to see if there might be anything useful.

But anyway, I might get to doing some of this type of stuff myself in mono and color, have a mono monitor, considering grabbing a semi-local EGA monitor and seeing what the ATI EGA Wonder, VGA Wonder, VGA 16 and a fancy seeming Video 7 TTL card will do.

edit: btw the slowness of the GUI on EGA, that's with zero, nada, zip 2D acceleration features. It's actually kinda hard to find anything but very early or very cheap VGA implementations without ANY kind of 2D acceleration of some kind, not the more sophisticated blitting stuff, but just basic drawing boxes, which helps more than you'd think. So if you find a very barebones VGA implementation, you may find it comparably slow.