Windows in EGA 640x200 with 16 colors

[UserPenalties]

This topic is about something that i found rather recently that i found interesting but i really had no place to post this anywhere honestly. Recently while searching for Windows 95 in strange graphics modes (primarily if it would work in CGA, but only the betas do) i found this beta-archive thread that asked for a 640x200 ega driver that itself linked another (https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=70158) thread. In that thread OP was asking wheter a 640x200 16 color EGA driver was available. He only had a CGA monitor, and since windows in EGA uses 640x350 (whereas CGA in windows 1.x - 3.x always used 640x200 monochrome), he was asking wheter someone could make a driver that used 640x200 instead of 640x350. Altough CGA was limited to 4 colors at most in 320x200, that limitation was directly from the video card itself, and not from a CGA monitor. A CGA monitor can already output 640x200, and it uses pins on the back of the video port to generate color (as well as a intensity pin to make another set of the same, but brighter colors) so in theory it could work.

You can read up on how the process went in that article, there is really not point on describing it here, there are some intresesting screenshots in there as well.

(I forgot that there is a file size limit to images so i might just post links instead)

20220507-230747-042042.png (7.03 KiB) Viewed 273 times

The resolution is 640x200, but the pixels are decidedly rectangular so the image does stretch out to what looks like a 3:2 aspect ratio. Still, windows 9x (or anything older than 3.x since that is the OS the drivers are based on) does not really compensate for this so the taskbar as well as the window bars appear stretched. Some windows 3.x programs like solitare kinda do compensate for this as you will see in the windows ME screenshot (linked) below.

https://www.vogons.org/download/file.ph ... &mode=view

The properties windows will not fit the screen at all, as if it was not already bad enough at 640x350. This is nothing noteworty, it happens with a normal EGA driver as well but since windows still kind of tries to use a "VGA" pallete, it tries to default to a color in the EGA pallete that is the closest to it, but the color that is used for the title in inactive window bars is probably using the same reference as the gray color in the inactive window bar. There are some missing pixels around the clock, and it tries to dither the active windows in the taskbar to get a white-ish color. You can see than in the windows ME screenshot.

Here are some windows 3.0 screenshots, they remind me of windows 1.0 in CGA since it also used 640x200, but the font also looks similar (in the about window and the title bars at least)
https://www.vogons.org/download/file.ph ... &mode=view
https://www.vogons.org/download/file.ph ... &mode=view

[UserPenalties]

god why did i take this so seriously

i wasted so much time on this whyyyyyy
(i also had more screenshots but they were not that exciting + file size limit )

[dvd3000]

What? This is actually pretty cool. I'd seen this before, but when I first saw it I was like "whaaaat and why".
Because well it's practically unusable but pretty cool. Well the properties window is hard to deal with in 640x480 even (at least for me or something)

Of course, I don't have any hardware THAT old, my oldest video card is a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5420 ISA VGA card, which is unbelievably uninteresting- Well, I was actually doing a project where I put a 486 dx-33 motherboard (my oldest board) in a homemade "small form factor" box. I know ISA SFF isn't a thing, but I removed the brackets from the cards, and in the process somehow broke off the hex nuts that held the bracket onto the video card (the metal was super brittle for some reason), so I guess I'm leaving it like this forever.

I probably should've made a page about that. Oh well, when I put it back together I'll take some photos.

[UserPenalties]

Because well it's practically unusable but pretty cool. Well the properties window is hard to deal with in 640x480 even (at least for me or something)

In windows 9x at least it was servicable since you could drag the window to be just a little bit off screen so you could see the buttons, but in windows 7 the window now gets centered so i have to use the tab key to navigate to the ok button