Testing unusual video drivers in Windows 95

[WinPC]

Yes, that's what I'm doing here. The first thing I did was to take the EGA.DRV driver from Microsoft Windows 3.1 (the original version, which is on the host system's hard drive) and use it in Microsoft Windows 95 (version 4.0) Codenamed "Chicago" Build 480 German. I'll be doing more of this later.

Here's a screenshot of Build 480 German with the Seegrün color scheme, also known as Marine (high color) in English:

Here, as you can see, it's running in EGA mode using EGA.DRV, and in 640x350, 16 Colors.

[Manosgun1]

Damn it s nice.

[Tandyman100]

Wow, that's EGA? That looks really nice! I'm gonna try that with my system...

[WinPC]

I have made many more screenshots of Windows 95 in EGA mode, though my screenshots are probably getting out of hand.

As you can see in this screenshot, the word "Windows" isn't visible since the dark grey color and the light grey color in the EGA 16 color pallete results in the same color tone:


At first the Microsoft Backup window wasn't positioned properly, but then I was able to maximize it with the keyboard, but not with the usual ALT+SPACEBAR:



The Properties windows were all too long for EGA, and this may be partly the reason as to why support for it was removed in Windows 95:


The Beizer screensaver worked fine, then something went wrong and then I wasn't able to view any screensaver, that had nothing to do with the video driver but it's a bug in Windows 95:


Some of the color schemes (like this one) look really strange in EGA mode, though this one might also look strange in VGA mode:


I accidentally selected the color scheme seen above and 640x480 (I think VGA mode), then I was able to switch back to the previous color scheme, I also didn't restart the system so I was able to change back to 640x350 without the system switching video modes. Anyway, here is proof that I actually used the EGA driver with Windows 95:


Paint worked properly and looked fine while maximized:




As with the Properties pages, Help was also too long for EGA:


Windows 95 Tour:


Since Windows 95 Tour is too large for EGA, the Microsoft Windows 95 airplane streamer flew off the screen:



The Run command worked fine:


Hearts worked properly, although the cards and the game area got somewhat compressed:


The rest of the games displayed and functioned properly:



The Windows 95 Help animations looked a bit weird with EGA:


Windows Explorer worked properly:


The Create Shortcut wizard also displayed and functioned properly with EGA, though it occupied most of the screen:


Note that I didn't actually shut down Windows:


Windows 95 Setup looks nice with EGA, though it would look nicer if these screenshots wern't lossy:


WordPad worked properly, though there wasn't much typing space:

[Tandyman100]

There's no such thing as too much screenshots! That's really awesome, dude!

My windows 3.1 machine doesn't look that good in EGA

[WinPC]

I just tried using CGA.DRV from Windows 3.00a and it didn't work, even when I renamed VGA.DRV to VGA, EGA.DRV to EGA, and S3.DRV to S3.

Does anyone know if Virtual PC 2004 is compatible with Hercules?

[linuxlove]

I just tried using CGA.DRV from Windows 3.00a and it didn't work, even when I renamed VGA.DRV to VGA, EGA.DRV to EGA, and S3.DRV to S3.

Does anyone know if Virtual PC 2004 is compatible with Hercules?

Maybe the emulated video card in VPC 04 isn't Hercules compatible? In DOSBox I think I did get Windows 3.1 to work in CGA mode.

[WinPC]

Yes, I already know about DOSBox, but I find it very difficult to use it with a bootable hard disk image. If someone could create one with Windows 95 then I would be happy to use that to test some of the more obscure video modes.

Anyway, I think I might test the Hercules driver from Windows 3.1 later, but it seems that GDI.EXE in Chicago (Windows 95) Build 480 German stopped working properly when I tried to replace some of the fonts with more EGA friendly ones.

[roytam1]

http://toastytech.com/guis/misc2.html
Yo can have monochrome display, but CGA.DRV won't work in 9x.

[WinPC]

I've known about the Nathan Lineback tricks for many years. However, I've decided that I'm going to install older Chicago builds and see if CGA.DRV works in them, and if it does, I'll also see what is the latest build that is compatible with that driver.

Anyway, Monochrome mode is also available with any version of VGA.DRV as far as I know, so it's still the same video driver.

EDIT: I have created screenshots of Windows 95 Setup executed from MS-DOS and running in EGA mode. I did this by copying the WIN95 folder from the Chicago Build 480 German package to the emulated hard drive in Virtual PC (C:\WIN95), and then from MS-DOS I extracted MINI.CAB, PRECOPY1.CAB, PRECOPY2.CAB, and WIN95_02.CAB, modified SYSTEM.INI to use the EGA system files, and then executed Windows 95 Setup from MS-DOS by typing DOSX instead of SETUP and pressing Enter.



























Here I got an error message stating that my system didn't meet the minimum system requirements for Windows 95:



When Setup exited, I ran it again, this time choosing the second option after having refused SafeRecovery (the second option was to have Setup not detect hardware automatically) and I got the same error message, then I ran DOSX with the /ID /IM /IS /IQ switches (since DOSX interprets any commands afterwards as that of the shell rather than that of DOSX itself), and I was able to skip automatic hardware detection completely, and was able to continue Setup:









Here I got an error message relating to the emulated network card (there was also a screenshot somewhere with the choice installing The Microsoft Network, Microsoft Exchange, and/or Microsoft Fax, where I selected all three and then deselected them, however, I think I overwrote it since I can't find it anywhere):













This billboard is slightly overlapping the progress bar:

[lightsleet]

I want to download windows 95 setup in EGA iso

[Ahmed Jebara]

Aww. You remind me when my Windows 98 Computer had problems in Display Driver and it runs a Monochrome Display. That was sucking

[Cats869]

Oh, that's pretty cool though we cannot expect much from Windows 95 if it's gonna use a driver from Windows 3.1 directly. But the EGA display looks sweet.

Offtopic Comment

One time, I had some display driver error on my virtual machine and my computer color mode went to 2-bit color (black and white only), so I was like what the heck is going here. I should have taken some pictures to show you what happens when you use different colors in paint under 2-bit mode, pretty interesting with all those weird patterns.