Windows 1.0 Alpha Release in Color

[jb881122]

After some poking around with the Windows 2.11 OAK, I modified the color EGA/VGA display driver so that it works with Windows 1.0 Alpha Release. It basically confirms what was found on this post, that Calculator's background was blue and Puzzle's was red.

The three programs that use colors in Alpha Release:


I won Reversi for once! It's hard to tell because the player and opponent colors are switched around from other builds (see this video for the middle Tandy build's Reversi colors).


For some reason, it seems like all reds and blues were switched from the Tandy builds:


There are a few big issues with these drivers as they sit:

• The obvious one, if you looked at the screenshots above, is that font support is messed up.
• When closing menus and erasing certain other display elements, the graphics underneath don't redraw correctly.
• With these drivers, Windows has the stability of a pile of twigs. It takes a lot of luck to open more than two programs in a session without crashing.

MS-DOS Executive is unreadable because of the font issue, so the best way to run programs is by going to File->Run (highlighted below), typing the name of the program (e.g. REVERSI.EXE), and pressing ENTER.


If you still want to try it, the drivers can be found at the following link. I highly recommend using the EGA driver because the VGA driver is even less stable and using it, you might have trouble running any programs.
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... 2mGy1RpMLQ

The main reason why I'm posting this now is because I will be going offline for a few days and want to see if anyone else is willing to take a look at the driver and work on improvements. Some of the things that would be appreciated are:

• Fixing any of the issues listed above or any that I overlooked.
• Full 16-color support (I thought someone did that for Windows 2.x, but I can't find it now).
• Porting the driver to DR5 if the driver format isn't too different.
• Any other improvements you can think of.

The source code can be found here:
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... UhVHGp6S3f

To assemble this, the following is required:

• The Alpha Release toolchain found on this post.
• Extra files in the BIN directory: MASM.EXE and LINK.EXE from MASM 4.0 as well as EXE2BIN.EXE (comes with DOS).
• The PATH variable pointing to all three of the following: the BIN directory, the LIB directory, and the directory containing COMMAND.COM.
• The LIB variable pointing to the LIB directory.

If you have all of that, just go to the source directory, run MAKE EGAVGA, and hope for the best.

If you don't have EXE2BIN.EXE, here it is with the version check patched out:
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... Tudp3oGd-9

Enjoy!

[Lucas Brooks]

Great work! Been waiting for this for years .

For some reason the VGA driver is more stable for me (did not crash at all).

After looking at photos and videos of pre-Beta Release builds, I believe it is safe to conclude that the darker colors were used from mid-1984 to April 1985. I suggest using the darker colors, to make it look more authentic.




Bullseye shouldn't have white spaces between the ellipses, so there is likely a bug in the driver somewhere.

[ToMi1]

That's great! It's nice to see a pre-Beta Release build in colors. I'll test the driver later.

Now we have to port it to DR5, too.

[ToMi1]

I have a question how to install the driver. When I ran EGA.EXE, DOS reported that I need Windows to run it, but when I ran it in Windows, it did nothing.

[Lucas Brooks]

I thought you know how to install a driver... use slow boot or copy it to the \WINDOWS\INSTALL directory and run the installation program.

[ToMi1]

Thank you very much. I was asking because I thought it is a self-extraction program which will extract the driver files, and I would then install them by using the "drivers" command.

[ToMi1]

[jb881122]

Thank you very much. I was asking because I thought it is a self-extraction program which will extract the driver files, and I would then install them by using the "drivers" command.

The "drivers" command was superseded by a more advanced installation program between DR5 and Alpha Release.

Also, I have been working on the font issue, and because I believe that StrBlt was completely rewritten between Windows 1.0 and 2.0, I tried a different approach to make fonts work. I disassembled the Beta Release EGAHIRES driver and made the same changes to that that I made to the 2.11 OAK-based driver. That gave me a driver where text worked, but stability was even more horrible and bitmaps failed to render properly. I then isolated the StrBlt code into its own ASM file and tried to hunt down any hardcoded offset references that might break it when moving the code. After that was done, I replaced Windows 2.11's StrBlt with the disassembled one and text rendered successfully. However, this caused some additional glitches that I am now trying to work out:

• Menu bar backgrounds are black except for around text.
• Some bitmaps still failed to render (look at the drive icons and scroll-up button in MS-DOS Executive).
• The cursor occasionally glitches when changing cursors, blanking out the graphics underneath.
• In Calculator, the up-arrow cursor is glitched.
• Reversi no longer works and crashes Windows when run.
• Some of Puzzle's lines are misdrawn.
• It has been getting harder for me to successfully start Windows in a way that I can run applications. The only way that I have been able to do it is by installing it and running WIN100.EXE directly (using WIN.EXE ran MS-DOS Executive, but crashed upon running anything). This might be due to the increasing driver size (~27 KB!), and your mileage may vary on this.

Of course, the other existing bugs still remain:

• Those stinking white lines on Bullseye. I wonder if some of the attributes that would be part of the DrawMode parameter of BitBlt in later builds were found elsewhere, since the monochrome driver doesn't have these white lines.
• The graphics under menus are still not redraw properly.
• Last, but certainly not least, it is still not afraid to crash, though that might be because of the other issues above.

I also made the colors darker in this driver, like in Lucas's screenshots.

The obligatory screenshot:


The "best of both worlds" driver:
Binaries: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... 7SYKOMJ3YA
Source Code: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... o-BnHqiwT5

The disassembled driver (in case you were curious about how bad it really was):
Binary: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... 3HKWp6Ke7f
Source Code: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... Z98VhU0AIC

[Lucas Brooks]

I feel like there is an underappreciation of jb881122's work. He literally ported a Windows 2.x driver to the second oldest leaked build of Windows 1.0. This thread died down a bit, so let me bump it with an update.

I managed to fix the black menu bar background and some rendering issues, also made Reversi run. The driver is probably slightly more stable now, at least you can open a few random apps without crashing. Replace BITBLT.ASM and STRBLT.ASM with these:

BITBLT.ASM
STRBLT.ASM

Compiled driver







Warning: Alpha Release is the pickiest Windows 1.0 build, so don't expect it to boot with the driver. I sent them to jb881122 before, and he wasn't able to get Alpha Release to boot with these fixes (most likely due to an environment issue). If you get a blank screen after starting Windows, try running WIN100.EXE (or KERNEl.EXE if you are using slow boot) directly. If you are lucky, you might get MS-DOS Executive to start.

-----

Also attempted to get RealizeObject and dither to match Beta Release's driver, and probably smashed the cursor glitch that way (don't know how). I was only able to boot Alpha Release with it once, and took this screenshot:



Both slow boot and fast boot choked and died violently the second time I started Alpha Release. Never managed to boot Alpha Release again with that driver.

[ToMi1]

That's great! Good job, both!

Maybe I know why is this thread so underrated. It's because there is lower amount of people which are interested in Win1.0 (and sometimes in Windows betas in general). Two years earlier, there were still many people interested in these things. I'm not happy with that, too. I wish there would be more people interested in this. It's just that the beta scene isn't the same as was before.

I know someone will not agree with me. That's just my opinion.

[johnlemon647]

I'm also interested Windows 1.0 and also interested in Windows 1.0 Alpha, Windows 1.0 DR5 and hopefully Windows 1.0 DR4 Allosgroup release contents of Windows DR4 Disks Soon. Good Work Lucas Brooks and jb881122 for getting Color on Windows 1.0 Alpha. Which it hard job to get color on Windows 1.0 Alpha. Did anyone tested out Windows 1.0 DR5 yet.

[ToMi1]

Not yet.

Also, I hope that DR4 will leak, too. It is very interesting find. We then will be able to figure out if the NE executable format was introduced in this build.

[jb881122]

Warning: Alpha Release is the pickiest Windows 1.0 build, so don't expect it to boot with the driver. I sent them to jb881122 before, and he wasn't able to get Alpha Release to boot with these fixes (most likely due to an environment issue). If you get a blank screen after starting Windows, try running WIN100.EXE (or KERNEl.EXE if you are using slow boot) directly. If you are lucky, you might get MS-DOS Executive to start.

I finally got it working in slow boot mode by replacing the default mouse driver with the Excel Runtime driver (the one you would use to have PS/2 mice on Beta Release/Premiere Edition).



EDIT: I also got fast boot working using the same method, but I had to run WIN100.EXE directly.

EDIT 2:
Here are some updated drivers. I dropped in Lucas's BITBLT.ASM and STRBLT.ASM files and trimmed out some unused code in other places (both drivers are ~1 KB smaller now). I don't think the blank screen when booting is caused by not having enough memory, because I was only able to use the VGA driver after running a dummy TSR program that is never called. Maybe Alpha Release is assuming the memory alignment of something when booting?

Binaries: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... Cux2-DEOCT
Source Code: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... A55ZMxMzX6



EDIT 3:
If you absolutely cannot get MS-DOS Executive to pop up and allow you to run other apps (blank screen), you can 'force' another app to run as shell by replacing MSDOS.EXE with another program in the INSTALL directory and re-running INSTALL.EXE. This allows other programs to run in configurations that do not allow MS-DOS Executive to be run. Maybe the blank screen is a result of not having enough memory (or maybe a large enough gap in memory), because I couldn't get PAINT.EXE (the only app larger than MS-DOS Executive) to run as shell.

Color Demo running as shell:


Exiting the Color Demo shell (can't type anything, requires a reboot):

[chasemorgan2010]

Can you get developer release 5 in color?

[johnlemon647]

They did not create color driver for Windows 1.0 DR5 yet.

[xyz]

Can you get developer release 5 in color?

The DR5 discussion is here: viewtopic.php?p=450995#p450995