I’d like to write a full-fledged blog post about these adventures at some point, but for now I’m going to focus on one particular side quest: getting acceptable video output out of the 1000H when it’s running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups.
By default, Windows 3.x renders using the standard “lowest common denominator” of video: VGA 640×480 at 16 colours. Unfortunately this looks awful on the Eee PC’s beautiful 1024×600 screen, and it’s not even the same aspect ratio.
But how can we do better?
↫ Ash Wolf
If you ever wanted to know how display drivers work in Windows 3.x, here’s your chance. This definitely falls into the category of light reading for the weekend.
I made my own basic driver for Silicon Motion Lynx EM gpus found in old Dell machines for Windows 3.11 and BeOS back in the day since none existed. No acceleration, just basic stuff. To make a driver today would take ages and the build enviroment alone in windows for such a project would be huge. The build time on a Pentium 2 mobile 400mhz would also be insane.