OBRIEN%OBRIEN@VENUS.YCC.YALE.EDU ("James A. O'Brien 432-4382", 203) (08/31/90)
Windows 3.0 on the Rainbow
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I've now installed Windows 3.0 on the Rainbow and, as promised, I'm posting
this message to summarize my opinions. My system (for your information) is a
100B with Turbow 286 (with 80287), 896k, 40Mb ST-251, amber monochrome monitor,
running MS-DOS 3.1b.
Installation is pretty painless (I had one or two problems, but they have
already been fixed by the developer), involving the creation of a
Rainbow-specific Disk #1, and then using the SETUP utility that comes with
Windows. YOU MUST HAVE CODE BLUE TO INSTALL WINDOWS. You also need MS-DOS
3.1.
The first thing you should do on bringing up Windows is to change the color
scheme from the default to the monochrome setup; otherwise, things look awful.
If you're used to running Windows 3.0 on a VGA or EGA, you'll notice that the
proportional system font doesn't look quite as nice; the Rainbow installation
uses CGA fonts, which are of lower resolution. However, I got used to the look
of the screen very quickly. Also, the screen updating is not as fast as on an
IBM AT with a VGA, but it is no slower than it was under Windows 2.11.
Every program I tried ran just fine: Excel, Actor, and various shareware
utilities such as Screen Peace (a screen saver), WinExit, Almanac, GCP,
FreeMem, etc. I ran into only two types of problem: a) some programs insist on
looking on drive C: for default stuff before they're installed---I fixed that
by typing assign c=e d=f before running Windows; b) one program I tried assumes
a display height greater than the Rainbow's 240 lines, and so I couldn't see
some of its window (it was a chess game, with fixed-size bitmaps for the board
and the chess pieces). There's no fix for that, except pleading with
developers to try hard to make no assumptions about the hardware. (Some
Windows programmers assume tacitly that people are using EGA or VGA hardware).
In summary, Windows 3.0 on the Rainbow is quite usable, at least with the
Turbow board. I should point out that I didn't try out all aspects of my
installation, such as printing, but it's all supposed to work just like on a
PC. The only basic thing Rainbow Windows can't do is to run non-Windows
applications; for that you have to exit Windows. The Rainbow Adaptation Kit
is available from Leonard Berk Consulting at (416) 260-0348. If there are
Windows applications that do what you want, and you'd like to extend the life
of your Rainbow, Windows 3.0 is a good way to go, in my opinion. My own major
use of the system is to run Actor 3.0, a Windows-based object-oriented
programming (OOP) language for developing Windows programs.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with any commercial enterprise mentioned
above, except as a satisfied customer.
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OBRIEN%OBRIEN@YALEVMS Jim O'Brien, Dept. of Chem. Engrg.
OBRIEN%OBRIEN@VENUS.YCC.YALE.EDU Yale University
OBRIEN@YALEVMS 2159 YS, New Haven CT 06520, U.S.A.
OBRIEN@VENUS.YCC.YALE.EDU +1 203 432 4382 (days)
>INTERNET:OBRIEN@VENUS.YCC.YALE.EDU (from Compuserve Easyplex)
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