https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/460 … or-Windows-3-11

ok so if this exists there must be some boards that provide windows 3.11 drivers

This file is written specifically for the Intel® 810 and the 815 chipset families and will not function with any other product

has anyone used this driver? has anyone ran windows 3.11 on a pIII?

im also trying to figure out with laptops.. if i was to get a brand new pII laptop somehow.. would most pentium II laptops + desktops still have windows 3.11 drivers on the cds that came with them? im guessing yes???

Just try to install it. It might work or not. There are no drivers needed for motherboard chipset. For basic operation you don't need any additional drivers at all. Just make sure the disk has FAT16 partitions less then 2GB in size - preferably around 500MB for c:. You also want to have around 32MB of memory - you should test if it's stable with more.

I don't think there is too much point in this, anything faster than a 486 is overkill for 3.1, and most applications/games will run on 95, but it surely will be fun.
You can look here for some information: http://www.win31.de/eindex.htm http://stephan.win31.de/w31xsys.htm
FWIW, I have a PII notebook (Medion MD9888, very similar to Twinhead Slimnote EX2) which came with Win 3.11 drivers (maybe 3.11 was even pre-installed, not sure about that). That one has a BX chipset, but I don't that matters too much as long as you don't insist on 32-bit file or disk access.
I suppose most ISA sound cards will work. Faster PIII notebooks will often have PCI-based sound solutions so could be problematic.
For video cards it depends on the chip manufacturer. nVidia is AFAIR only supported up to Riva 128, there is an unofficial Voodoo3 driver, Matrox has 3.1 drivers up to G400 (or G450?) on their site. The notebook I mentioned has Trident Cyber 9397 graphics.

Windows 3.0 received two updates. A few months after introduction, Windows 3.0a was released as a maintenance release, resolving bugs and improving stability. A "multimedia" version, Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions 1.0, was released in October 1991. This was bundled with "multimedia upgrade kits", comprising a CD-ROM drive and a sound card, such as the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Pro. This version was the precursor to the multimedia features available in Windows 3.1 and later, and was part of Microsoft's specification for the Multimedia PC.

The features listed above and growing market support from application software developers made Windows 3.0 wildly successful, selling around 10 million copies in the two years before the release of version 3.1. Windows 3.0 became a major source of income for Microsoft, and led the company to revise some of its earlier plans. Support was discontinued on December 31, 2001.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Windows

so if this is true... then perhaps intel chipsets up untill dec 2001 were likely to have official windows 3.1 drivers for them?

im checking some motherboards manuals + "support downloads"
i cant find any that have windows 3.1 drivers after 1996..

Pentium II + Pentium III boards dont seem to come with windows 3.11 "official" drivers from what i can see

for example
this mobo: (from october 1996)
p/I-XP55T2P4 support: http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/sock7/430 … p55t2p4-300.pdf
this manual mentions windows 3.11 + audio drivers..

but this mobo: (from aug 1997)
http://www.motherboards.org/files/manuals/1/tx97e-112.pdf
asus tx97-e doesnt seem to mention win3.1 at all

idspispopd wrote:

FWIW, I have a PII notebook (Medion MD9888, very similar to Twinhead Slimnote EX2) which came with Win 3.11 drivers (maybe 3.11 was even pre-installed, not sure about that). That one has a BX chipset, but I don't that matters too much as long as you don't insist on 32-bit file or disk access.
I suppose most ISA sound cards will work. Faster PIII notebooks will often have PCI-based sound solutions so could be problematic.
For video cards it depends on the chip manufacturer. nVidia is AFAIR only supported up to Riva 128, there is an unofficial Voodoo3 driver, Matrox has 3.1 drivers up to G400 (or G450?) on their site. The notebook I mentioned has Trident Cyber 9397 graphics.

this is exactly what i was trying to get at.. and to answer the question, to which level was this os still supported? to stay within the realm of normal behaviour.. for both desktop + notebook systems.
if these laptops have pci based solutions they may have provided specific drivers to support the windows 3.11 os with the updated hardware...

i think the BX chipset is probably the last.. except for this 810/815 driver i found thats just for the integrated GPU in these PIII boards..

perhaps a vogons user knows some intimate details about a non-intel chipset that supported win3.1 way longer then most others??

Why would you need chipset drivers? Just get a PC with a graphics card supported in Windows 3.11 - I know S3 supported it as far as the Savage4, I had one of those myself - and a sound card that is also supported, any ISA card will do - worst case scenario use it like a WSS card or SBPro/16, I know YMF-719 even has SoftSynth for 3.11, and I think a few PCI cards like the Ensoniq AudioPCI had 3.11 drivers as well. Windows 3.11 behaves more like a DOS GUI than Win9x does, in the sense that it doesn't try to handle all the hardware itself, so as long as DOS runs, so will Windows (with tweaks for machines with more than 256MB I think), and the drivers are only needed for functionality DOS doesn't handle itself. The only exception would be 32-bit file access and networking on Windows for Workgroups 3.11, the vanilla 3.1/3.11 has no file caching (needs SmartDrive for that) and relies on a DOS network stack.

i actually just bought a soundblaster 16 /w a sound blaster awe32 upgrade...it was only 20$ and it seemed rare! i never saw this upgrade card before when i was a kid.. but afterwards thinking about it its not that smart.. to take up 2 isa slots to acieve the same result as one.... ohwell. impulse buy!!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/151790119278?_trksid= … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

the only real benefit of such a card would be to install it into a 486 motherboard that has 2 or more 8bit ISA slots
but.. it was only 20$ and it does have the ram slots for the awe32.. will be interesting to play with.

honestly i knew EVERYTHING about windows 3.11 when i was a kid. im 38 years old now... i was using windows 3.0 when i was less than 10 years old. got my first ibm AT computer when i was about 7 years old. the first games i ever played on it were completely text based.. on a monochrome monitor 😁 i grew up with this stuff.. its easy to forget all the particulars after 30 years tho! i had a vic 20 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20) when i was about 5 years old.

As above, Win3x isn't an OS outright its just a shell. As long as dos runs your safe.
For some of the "enhanced" features.
- Graphics wise on Nvida site of things you can go as far as TNT2 officially, their maybe hacks to go later?
- 32bit disk access is down to the HDD manufacture and doubt you have any chance with anything relatively new. You can get the drivers here though
http://www.mdgx.com/w31toy.htm#W3X under Fast Disk Access (FBDA) 32-bit drivers.

I had a similar idea and settled on a Slot 1 P3. the deciding factor was an ISA slot for sound and AGP for the TNT2, Even got an TNT2 Ultra for £10 may still do it now I have a few more PC's but that only lasted a week till I upgraded to a Gforce Ti4600 and Win98

I had a similar idea of the final 3x PC and even got a TNT Ultra for the project. I settled on a P3 motherboard with ISA (for sound) as really its just a dos and 3x is a shell.

Whats really annoying is the blue rectangle windows loading screen only lasts a second. That always looked classy to me, Your left with a black screen for most of the loading time

chinny22 wrote:

As above, Win3x isn't an OS outright its just a shell. As long as dos runs your safe. For some of the "enhanced" features. - Gra […]
Show full quote

As above, Win3x isn't an OS outright its just a shell. As long as dos runs your safe.
For some of the "enhanced" features.
- Graphics wise on Nvida site of things you can go as far as TNT2 officially, their maybe hacks to go later?
- 32bit disk access is down to the HDD manufacture and doubt you have any chance with anything relatively new. You can get the drivers here though
http://www.mdgx.com/w31toy.htm#W3X under Fast Disk Access (FBDA) 32-bit drivers.

I had a similar idea and settled on a Slot 1 P3. the deciding factor was an ISA slot for sound and AGP for the TNT2, Even got an TNT2 Ultra for £10 may still do it now I have a few more PC's but that only lasted a week till I upgraded to a Gforce Ti4600 and Win98

I had a similar idea of the final 3x PC and even got a TNT Ultra for the project. I settled on a P3 motherboard with ISA (for sound) as really its just a dos and 3x is a shell.

Whats really annoying is the blue rectangle windows loading screen only lasts a second. That always looked classy to me, Your left with a black screen for most of the loading time

i ran windows 98se for awhile with a geforce 2 card and found it to be pretty damn good.. so a ti4600 must be even better!
the reason i was asking yes.. i also have a few pentium 3 boards.. (1 is 440BX + slot1, the other is 815E + socket 370) also a few TNT2 cards lying around.. as well as a ATI RAGE AGP card..these are my oldest boards that i have.. and im wondering.. are they old enough>? or do i really have to get hardware that is older to be able to run these os properly...

i think the splash only lasts a second because of the faster PIII cpu running at different cycles.. see this is what i have been trying to figure out ultimately.. is it ok to run 3.1 on a pIII or is it just not going to ever work properly.. because of the differences in cpu speed causing small differences + problems all over the place

I've ran 3.11 on a P3 700MHz machine + S3 Savage 4 + some ISA VIbra card - worked flawlessly.
I've ran 3.11 on a Duron 1200MHz machine + GeForce 4MX + onboard sound - no drivers for the GeForce nor sound card, it's SoundBlaster support needed a TSR that disabled itself partially when detected Windows was starting up. Other than that (limited to VGA and CD-audio only), it ran just fine.

I think most Windows 3.11 software works pretty well on a 486. However, some of the more advanced software will definitely benefit from having a Pentium. I think a K6-200 was the fastest system I ran Windows 3.11 on (In 1997 it was still my main "OS"). I never bothered to run it on anything faster because at that point none of the new hardware had Windows 3.x drivers. You really need to run 800x600 with more than 256 colours to enjoy Windows 3.1 (though some software will only work in 640x480x256 so you have to switch back and forth). I'm not really sure what 16-bit file access is like on something like a PII or PIII, but I can tell you the performance suffered a lot on a 486. I always preferred to have both 32-bit disk and file access enabled. I believe the disk access driver is provided by the hard disk controller manufacturer, not from the hard drive manufacturer.

The best soundcard I ever used with Windows 3.11 was the AWE64 gold. The software package it came with was really well polished too. I'm sure there were other good ones too, but the AWE64Gs are easy to find. Stuff made after 1997 (like the yamaha cardS) only provided basic drivers, and they are kind of fussy.

The best videocard I ever used with Windows 3.11 was the ATi Mach64 Graphics Pro Turbo. I really liked Flexdesk. It allowed you to make screen adjustments on the fly without restarting windows, and provided true color up to 1280x1024. I later tried a PCI Voodoo3 and a TNT1. The PCI Voodoo3 driver is actually official, but it was OEM Compaq specific. It works okay, but only up to 16-bit colour. I wouldn't recommend the TNT1. I can't remember specifically what the problem was, but I think it was really buggy (rendering problems). I heard the Riva128 drivers aren't much better.

32-bit access, AFAIK, doesn't make all that much difference. 32-bit file access, on the other hand, does, as without it Windows doesn't do any caching. Even with that enabled, provided you have enough RAM, I'd still start SmartDrv with a small buffer because 32-bit file access can't cache anything other than HDDs, like floppies, CD/DVDs, ZIP drives, etc.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I think most Windows 3.11 software works pretty well on a 486. However, some of the more advanced software will definitely benefit from having a Pentium. I think a K6-200 was the fastest system I ran Windows 3.11 on (In 1997 it was still my main "OS"). I never bothered to run it on anything faster because at that point none of the new hardware had Windows 3.x drivers.

i never had a k6 chip ever in my life... i think i went from having a 486 DX2 66 to a pentium II Slot 1.. probably a 233Mhz.. i cant remember for certain, 1997 was a long time ago!! but i think what u are saying makes sense.. in that windows 3.11 was only actively developed for, up untill early 1997 - i remember i was still running windows 3.11 up untill 1997, or about the time
that the osr2.5 version of win95 came out. i remember i had this on a zip 100 disk to be able to install it from my zip 100 parallel drive. but yes. it makes sense that the only official support for both software + hardware was actively being developed + maintained up untill the end of the socket 5/7 cpus.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

You really need to run 800x600 with more than 256 colours to enjoy Windows 3.1 (though some software will only work in 640x480x256 so you have to switch back and forth). I'm not really sure what 16-bit file access is like on something like a PII or PIII, but I can tell you the performance suffered a lot on a 486. I always preferred to have both 32-bit disk and file access enabled. I believe the disk access driver is provided by the hard disk controller manufacturer, not from the hard drive manufacturer.

ive had nothing but problems enablng this, when i last tried to enable it on my abit be6 board, somehow it caused my whole drive to get corrupted. i had to erase the drive and start over from scratch!!

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The best soundcard I ever used with Windows 3.11 was the AWE64 gold. The software package it came with was really well polished too. I'm sure there were other good ones too, but the AWE64Gs are easy to find. Stuff made after 1997 (like the yamaha cardS) only provided basic drivers, and they are kind of fussy.

i also had a 64 gold back in 1997 it was my prized posession. i remember installing it into my supermicro P6SBA motherboard + being so proud of all my components! and that i had finally gotten a pentium system.. i was using the 486 DX2 for the whole time the pentium1's were out. my first pentium system was a P2!! and i think it was even sometime in 1998 that i got it. because the P6SBA board was released in 98.. not 97.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The best videocard I ever used with Windows 3.11 was the ATi Mach64 Graphics Pro Turbo. I really liked Flexdesk. It allowed you to make screen adjustments on the fly without restarting windows, and provided true color up to 1280x1024.

i have one of these cards still - the original card that i had back then, its dated 1995 on the pci card. but theres a problem with it.. it shows up all yellow as if one of the pins on the card is damaged somehow..and not making proper contact with the monitor plug.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I later tried a PCI Voodoo3 and a TNT1. The PCI Voodoo3 driver is actually official, but it was OEM Compaq specific. It works okay, but only up to 16-bit colour. I wouldn't recommend the TNT1. I can't remember specifically what the problem was, but I think it was really buggy (rendering problems). I heard the Riva128 drivers aren't much better.

ive never tried a voodoo card ever! dont they support mac os too? i think some of the first matrox pci cards support macintosh aswell. i remember my first matrox card had both types of monitor ports on the card itself..

i never had a k6 chip ever in my life...

Don't worry, you didn't miss out. The K6 was worth skipping (looked good on paper though). In hindsight I should have just upgraded my 486 to 20mb, and gotten a better graphics adapter until prices of PII fell in 99. I still regret missing out on the original Pentium though. 94-95 was the time to get on the Pentium bandwagon.

it makes sense that the only official support for both software + hardware was actively being developed + maintained up untill the end of the socket 5/7 cpus.

In 1997 software support for Windows 3.x dropped like a rock. It got to the point where I was pissed off enough to upgrade (thankfully to NT4 [a proper operating system] and not 9x).

ive had nothing but problems enablng this, when i last tried to enable it on my abit be6 board, somehow it caused my whole drive to get corrupted. i had to erase the drive and start over from scratch!!

Were you using the "promise" controller on that board?

i also had a 64 gold back in 1997 it was my prized posession.

I kept using mine until ISA slots went away. Still have it too.

i have one of these cards still - the original card that i had back then, its dated 1995 on the pci card. but theres a problem with it.. it shows up all yellow as if one of the pins on the card is damaged somehow..and not making proper contact with the monitor plug.

Yeah, sounds like a bad red signal. Use a multimeter to see if you can find the problem.

ive never tried a voodoo card ever! dont they support mac os too? i think some of the first matrox pci cards support macintosh aswell. i remember my first matrox card had both types of monitor ports on the card itself..

I'm not totally sure about Voodoo1 and Voodoo3, but I am pretty sure you can get a standard voodoo3 working in a Mac if you reflash the BIOS. The Voodoo3 was a really nice card despite all the crap it gets for "killing" 3dfx. I like mine. It has good 2d output quality, DOS support, windows 3.1 support and glide is fast and looks nice.

Were you using the "promise" controller on that board?

i dont think i was using the RAID ports no.. but the 440BX chipset "Built in" ports...
it was definately related to enabling "32 bit" file + disk access because before that it was fine..
and i was using a 2gb partition formatted to FAT16.. actually it might have been because i installed first using fat32 + dos 7.0 there was a
wierd cd that i found to install from that was rigged to set it up that way.. on its own. dos 7.0

i immediately had a bad feeling when i saw the dos 7.0 logo because i remembered i was using dos 3.something + 5.0 when i used windows 3.0

32-bit file/disk access should NEVER be enabled when using Windows 3.11 under DOS 7.x if any FAT32 partitions are visible. 32-bit file access is basically a virtual file system. It skips DOS file handling functions and implements it in a Windows driver that provides caching. It is basically one of the things Windows 9x does. If used in a fully supported environment (no FAT32, no LFNs, etc.) it should be harmless. Also, AFAIK it performs a bit better than SmartDrive, but doesn't cache CD-ROMs or floppies.

32-bit disk access should not (and Windows will probably not even allow it to) be enabled unless you are using a supported disk. This skips INT13h for handling the hard disk, and replaces it with a protected mode driver that talks with the hardware directly. While it is supposed to speedup things, I've heard it shows very anemic improvements and more often than not not worth the trouble of getting it to work. On a newer PC with UDMA support you can probably use something like UIDE in DOS to replace INT13h with a handler that is UDMA aware, and would probably offset any improvements of 32-bit disk access anyway.