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Fun with Windows for Workgroups

Robbbert

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 10, 2019
Messages
445
I've recently been playing around with 2 installations of Windows for Workgroups 3.11 . One is on a 386/33 machine, the other on a Celeron 500 (compaq).

Firstly, a description of the machines.

The 386 has a 500MB hard drive, SuperVGA video, a Soundblaster, and a network card. Drivers have been installed for the network and the soundblaster, they work well.

The Celeron 500MHz has a 1.2GB hard drive, Intel 82810 on-board video, on-board sound, and a E100B network card. The driver for the network card is installed and working, but unable to locate suitable drivers for the others.

The 386 can do 640x480x256, or 800x600x16. The Celeron can do 640x480x16, or 800x600x16 - unable to get 256 colours.

The installed network protocols on both are NetBUEI and TCP/IP. The machines can access a shared drive on my Win98SE machine, and can also access the internet.

I wanted to know how far such an antiquated system could go. Firstly I added Win32s (allows WFW to run some 32-bit apps), and WinG (the predecessor to DirectX).

Next came Winzip 6.2, and Acrobat Reader 3.0.1 - they both ran flawlessly.

I was able to find the 16-bit version of Space Cadet Pinball. Just like the Microsoft version, you just copy it to a folder - no install. It requires at least 256 colours, so it ran at a crawl on the 386. The Celeron would have been better, but without the video driver there's no chance of it running.

So far so good. The last thing was to try out some internet browsers. This is when the problems started. Freezing, crashing and random GPF was the order of the day. Not only that, but the encryption levels are almost useless, you're lucky if you even get TLS 1.0 - and javascript support was almost non-existent. Still, a few sites worked (somewhat). Google, msn and my sites were mostly workable.

Don't bother with Netscape 3.0 - it's utterly hopeless. It can't display Google, and every single javascript error produced an answerable message which couldn't be turned off.

I made the mistake of trying IE5 on the Celeron machine - it almost immediately froze the entire computer, leaving no choice but to switch it off. This corrupted a few files including the registry. I had to manually delete IE5. Fortunately the registry isn't used much in WFW, so it wasn't fatal. Windows continued to work, and MS Office was somehow able to repair the registry, for which I am thankful.

So, we come to the questions.

1. Does anyone know of a video driver for the 82810 which works on WFW?

2. Does anyone know of a browser which actually works on WFW without blowing up or otherwise misbehaving?
 
MicroWeb or Arachne for DOS might work.

I used to IRC on a 386DX/40 with 16MB of RAM maybe 15 years ago for kicks and people would post links that would bomb the last Win16 version of Netscape all the time.
 
The last version of Netscape for Windows 3.1x was Netscape 4.08. That won't get you very far these days, though.

There was a version of Opera for Windows 3.1, but It wasn't very powerful.
 
I've got Opera installed, but like the rest of them it has its moments. It's also trial-ware, so eventually it will expire. I need to find out how to get around that.
 
Opera 3.62 was the last 16-bit version. Probably the best one for Win3.x, but the landscape of the "interwebs" has changed so much since its' heyday that it isn't very useful, either. Pretty much forget anything that's https.... which is nearly all of it now.
 
You could easily install a proxy that makes modern websites compatible with older systems. I think there are even public online ones if you don't want to run one locally. The question remains: why?
 
As to another DOS browser, there's a beta Links2 for DOS with graphical mode support (I think it uses Watcom TCP). No JavaScript or CSS, but modern TLS support and PNG support, and realistically needs 16MB of RAM.
I doubt there is any hope for JavaScript even if you somehow ported a modern engine down to Win32s--these machines have no hope of compiling multi megabytes of source code in any tolerable amount of time.
 
I gave up on http: with my 386. I can still FTP to places and get files. Normally I DL what I want using a current newish compute and browser, which I can then transfer it to the 386 over my local NET.

I'm running WFW 3.11 on my 386.
 
May as well use this thread for my efforts on Windows 3.1 - unlike WFW there's no networking. I've been trying out Microsoft Networks 3.0 so far without success, but I haven't given up yet.

There's been efforts to get USB sticks working in DOS, and the results have been wildly variable at best. You can only use a FAT-formatted stick (not FAT32 or anything else), so the old Sandisk Cruzer Mini 128MB is suitable.
So firstly you use a floppy to copy the USB drivers across, then you modify config.sys. Then you reboot, plug the stick in when asked, it should be detected. After you're in DOS, try to access the drive. If you're lucky you'll get an Abort, Retry, Fail prompt, press R and it works. Yay! So I used that to transfer large files across. You can still use a floppy disk for small files. If you want to use another USB-stick it won't be recognised until you reboot.

Obviously there's no USB ports on a 386, but there's 2 of them on the Celeron machine.

I also found my Video for Windows floppies (set of 2), this installed fine too.
 
1. Does anyone know of a video driver for the 82810 which works on WFW?

Someone was kind enough to upload this to archive.org - it doesn't work as is, you need to manually expand files, but once done the results are excellent.

I made a new zipfile with all the files expanded already, so next time it should just work.

Now I just need to update the other 5 disks with windows 3.1 on them.

As a result, the pinball space cadet game runs perfectly well on the Celeron machine (still no sound, it doesn't work with the PC Speaker driver, so I need to add a proper Sound Blaster card).
A job for tomorrow.
 
the pinball space cadet game runs perfectly well on the Celeron machine (still no sound, it doesn't work with the PC Speaker driver

Even if it did work, you wouldn't have much fun. There's no midi with that driver and any wavetable sound briefly freezes the machine (so most of the game would be frozen, waiting for the interrupt to clear from each sound).
 
It has that, plus 16 bit (64k) and 24 bit (16.7m) colours. I chose 64k.

Even after the installation, they also supply help files in various languages, and a control panel applet - but they totally forget to copy them over. I made a small batch file to fix that.

As for the MS networking, I gave up - it kept freezing at the "net start". The USB stick will have to do.
 
I wonder if that driver work on i830 if I manually edit it to work. Would love to get it working well on a Dell C400, but still stuck with no soundcard which sucks. PCMCIA soundcards are sooo expensive.

I do know linux uses the same driver for 810/815/830.
 
To finish this off (for now), I added a Sound blaster 16, and used the original install CD - it all went in painlessly and worked well. Pinball was rather jerky though, it does seem there's an interrupt issue, even though it produced sound (including the midi music).

Then I added a CDROM drive and the DOS drivers for it (aoatapi.sys and mscdex.exe). I connected the audio output of the drive to the SB16, and installed the cd-audio driver in Windows. The media player could then play the music CD to the SB16. I wanted to join the pc speaker output to the SB16 as well, but I don't have a suitable cable. I may have to make up one.

Lastly was the discovery (on WFW), that after booting the computer into DOS (not windows), running the "net" command will hook up your mapped drives and you can access those drives while still in DOS.
 
Even if it did work, you wouldn't have much fun. There's no midi with that driver and any wavetable sound briefly freezes the machine (so most of the game would be frozen, waiting for the interrupt to clear from each sound).

The PC Speaker driver has an option to allow interrupts while playing sound. The downside is that it makes the audio playback choppy, but it does stop the machine from locking up when playing audio.
 
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