Versions 5.3a and 6.53 support Windows 3.1x through Windows 95 (version 6.53 can be installed in Windows 98, but VESA driver is unusable).I want to expand a little bit on SciTech Display Doctor (SDD). For that functionality to work correctly, the VDDSVGA.386 virtual device driver would probably need be patched as well (and maybe the ‘386 grabber’ driver too). (If you feel adventurous, you may even try further patching the driver to enable other resolutions.) For basic usage the patched driver seems sufficient, but I noticed that starting a DOS box, switching between full-screen and windowed modes thereof or even triggering a blue screen usually causes visual glitches (which may require Windows to be restarted) or outright crashes Windows immediately. The patch accomplishes its task by replacing the hardware-specific mode-switching routines (and some data structures) in SVGA256.DRV with routines using VBE calls. The patched driver doesn’t expose the full VBE capabilities it can only switch to one of three hardcoded modes supported by the original driver (640×480, 800×6×768). Enter the SYSTEM directory and run svgaptch -p.Point the installer to installation archives/floppies as necessary. Open Windows Setup and change the display driver to 256-colour SuperVGA with your chosen resolution.Download the archive and extract SVGAPTCH.EXE into some known location.
The above notwithstanding, there is a hacky partial solution: Japheth’s SVGAPatch. The same project also developed a VBE driver for earlier versions of Windows NT. In Windows 95, the driver architecture was simplified: drivers could re-use generic drawing routines from the DIB engine, which is (presumably) what enabled the development of a VBE driver for Windows 9x from the VBEMP project. This in turn means that one should not expect it to be easy to create such a driver from scratch it certainly wouldn’t be a weekend project. According to a post on OS/2 Museum, the display driver architecture of Windows 3.x was pretty baroque: the drivers were required to implement not only mode switching and transferring pixel buffers to the screen but also many drawing operations as well. Microsoft started bundling a VBE driver with the operating system only as late as with Windows XP, by which time the Windows 3.x (and 9x) driver architecture was long obsolete. It seems unlikely that a fully-functional VBE driver for Windows 3.x exists.
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