J. Radon
Experienced Member
I'm a bit confused with how colors work in windows 98SE.
In the settings tab under display properties it says it's set to 256 color mode and my screen area is 1024 by 768. The actual color gradient underneath it however looks like only 6 colors with dithering, instead of a smooth blend. Then when I go into paint and go to define custom colors, it's more of the same; dithering. I don't think it's actually displaying 256 colors, I think it's maybe displaying in 16 bit color? I don't really know how to tell what the actual color depth is, but whenever I try to set any particular custom color, it turns into grey.
It's particularly annoying because I wanted to play around with making some tiled pixel art for a desktop background, and I cant get a good shade of mint green.
I think it's a driver issue. I can't find a working driver online for my trident tgui9680-1 video card. I found one called w98-tgui.exe (can't remember where, I dug around a bit on a few sites), and based on the description it sounded like what I was looking for. However, when I load it onto a floppy and pop it into my win98 rig, I get an error when I try to run it or copy it to the desktop (I tried 3 different floppies, and verified the files copied right when I wrote them on my win10 machine.
I feel pretty dumb asking a lot of probably basic questions here, I hope i'm not too much of a bother. A few years ago when I signed up here I referred to my grandpa's pc as an "IBM clone", so clearly I didn't know what I was talking about. I'm learning a lot about vintage computers (especially vintage hardware), but a lot of stuff still eludes me, like why this thing has a power switch directly wired to the power supply; was that just standard at the time? It completely bypasses the motherboard. When I try to shut it down in the system it always hangs at the end and I have to manually power it off: but that's another completely unrelated thing, this topic is just about getting 256 color working.
In the settings tab under display properties it says it's set to 256 color mode and my screen area is 1024 by 768. The actual color gradient underneath it however looks like only 6 colors with dithering, instead of a smooth blend. Then when I go into paint and go to define custom colors, it's more of the same; dithering. I don't think it's actually displaying 256 colors, I think it's maybe displaying in 16 bit color? I don't really know how to tell what the actual color depth is, but whenever I try to set any particular custom color, it turns into grey.
It's particularly annoying because I wanted to play around with making some tiled pixel art for a desktop background, and I cant get a good shade of mint green.
I think it's a driver issue. I can't find a working driver online for my trident tgui9680-1 video card. I found one called w98-tgui.exe (can't remember where, I dug around a bit on a few sites), and based on the description it sounded like what I was looking for. However, when I load it onto a floppy and pop it into my win98 rig, I get an error when I try to run it or copy it to the desktop (I tried 3 different floppies, and verified the files copied right when I wrote them on my win10 machine.
I feel pretty dumb asking a lot of probably basic questions here, I hope i'm not too much of a bother. A few years ago when I signed up here I referred to my grandpa's pc as an "IBM clone", so clearly I didn't know what I was talking about. I'm learning a lot about vintage computers (especially vintage hardware), but a lot of stuff still eludes me, like why this thing has a power switch directly wired to the power supply; was that just standard at the time? It completely bypasses the motherboard. When I try to shut it down in the system it always hangs at the end and I have to manually power it off: but that's another completely unrelated thing, this topic is just about getting 256 color working.