gunjan@garnet.berkeley.edu (Gunjan Bhow) (05/19/91)
I have a Western Digital VGA with the Paradise chipset alongwith
the following configuration:
386SX motherboard
2 MB RAm
1024x768 monitor
I run Windows 3.0 in 386 Enh mode.
Till now, I was running 800x600x16 resolution. (my vga has 256K memory)
and using the "win3_16f.exe" driver from cica. No problem so far.
I read somewhere that with 256k, i can also use the 640x480x256 resolution.
Since I had lots of .bmp files in this resolution and they looked much nicer
than their dithered 800x600x16 counterparts, i decided to give this new
resolution a try.
I loaded the "win3_256.exe" file from cica and extracted it. From
Setup, I had two choices, 640 x 400 x 256 and 640 x 480 x 256. I chose
the 640x480. After I exited setup and ran win, two things happened.
First, after the inital banner, my hard disk light was on for a long time.
I expected this since the driver I was using before was a "fast" kind.
Second, and more important, I could not see anything even after my hard disk
stopped ( not even the hourglass). I assumed windows was loaded and exited it
by Alt+F+X and I was back to dos.
Again from setup, I tried the other choice, 640x400x256 and to my surprise,
everything worked fine. Although the loading was still slower, I could use
my 640x480x256 bitmaps (of course, at a loss of the 80 pixels).
One more thing, when I use the grafwk51.zip (graphics workshop) which is
a non-windows utility with the Paradise plus driver it comes with
(PARAPLUS.DRV), I AM able to use 640x480x256 pictures.
Any ideas why I can't use the 640x480x256 resolution in Windows? Do I need
extra memory just for Windows sincw dos apps have no problem?
Thanks for any suggestions.
Gunjan Bhow
gunjan@garnet.berkeley.edu
Instructional Technology Program
UC Berkeleyc164-al@juliet.uucp (Joon Song) (05/20/91)
In article <1991May19.090016.15758@agate.berkeley.edu> gunjan@garnet.berkeley.edu (Gunjan Bhow) writes: >I run Windows 3.0 in 386 Enh mode. > >Till now, I was running 800x600x16 resolution. (my vga has 256K memory) >and using the "win3_16f.exe" driver from cica. No problem so far. > >I read somewhere that with 256k, i can also use the 640x480x256 resolution. >Since I had lots of .bmp files in this resolution and they looked much nicer >than their dithered 800x600x16 counterparts, i decided to give this new >resolution a try. If your VGA card only has 256K of memory, you CAN NOT display 640x480x256. The maximum resolution at which you can display 256 colors is 640x400x256. The reason for this is very simple. Each pixel in a 256 color display requires one byte of video memory. So, to display 640x480x256, you would need 640*480*1 bytes of video memory. But 640*480*1 = 307,200. Since your vga card does not have 307,200 bytes of video memory, you can't use the 640x480x256 mode. If you do the math for 640x400x256, you will find that it takes just under 256K. (Note: 1K = 1024 bytes). Joon Song joonsong@ocf.berkeley.edu