256 color palette
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Cleaning up the basement, I found a couple still readable disks from my Win95 days. Scanning through them for anything that should be preserved, I came across one long forgotten program (called C-MAP, but that is not essential here). It certainly would start up under Win10, but only to display a message that it can only be run in a 256 palette mode. I remember that there was a setting in WinXP where you could flag an .exe to be run in 256 color mode. Maybe it was still available in Win7; I don't think I ever had the need then, and never knew. I have been searching all over the place in Win10, with a GeForce 610Ti display card, but can't find any similar setting anywhere. Googling gives me a lot of hints on how to do it, but the options I am told to select is absent from the dialogs - the hints appear to predate both Win10 and Win7. Is there any way to emulate 256 color palette is Win10 with a GeForce display card? Does it depend on the driver, or is the problem with Windows dropping this feature some time ago? My only reasons for running C-MAP are nostalgic ones; I have no real "need" for it. But maybe, deeper down in the pile of old disks, I will find another program with similar 256-color requirements, and this program is needed for rescuing some valuable data files. So I would certainly like to know of a general way to handle it, not for C-MAP specifically.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Cleaning up the basement, I found a couple still readable disks from my Win95 days. Scanning through them for anything that should be preserved, I came across one long forgotten program (called C-MAP, but that is not essential here). It certainly would start up under Win10, but only to display a message that it can only be run in a 256 palette mode. I remember that there was a setting in WinXP where you could flag an .exe to be run in 256 color mode. Maybe it was still available in Win7; I don't think I ever had the need then, and never knew. I have been searching all over the place in Win10, with a GeForce 610Ti display card, but can't find any similar setting anywhere. Googling gives me a lot of hints on how to do it, but the options I am told to select is absent from the dialogs - the hints appear to predate both Win10 and Win7. Is there any way to emulate 256 color palette is Win10 with a GeForce display card? Does it depend on the driver, or is the problem with Windows dropping this feature some time ago? My only reasons for running C-MAP are nostalgic ones; I have no real "need" for it. But maybe, deeper down in the pile of old disks, I will find another program with similar 256-color requirements, and this program is needed for rescuing some valuable data files. So I would certainly like to know of a general way to handle it, not for C-MAP specifically.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
For Windows 11: 1. Right-click on the program's icon 2. Select "properties" from the menu 3. Click on the "compatibility" tab 4. Click on the "reduced color mode" check box 5. Select "8-bit (256) color" I assume that it is similar for Windows 10. This will work for 32-bit programs, but not for 64-bit programs (which didn't exist under O/S versions before XP). EDIT: Added select "properties" step
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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For Windows 11: 1. Right-click on the program's icon 2. Select "properties" from the menu 3. Click on the "compatibility" tab 4. Click on the "reduced color mode" check box 5. Select "8-bit (256) color" I assume that it is similar for Windows 10. This will work for 32-bit programs, but not for 64-bit programs (which didn't exist under O/S versions before XP). EDIT: Added select "properties" step
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
How the * could I overlook that? I could swear that I had been searching 'Properties' half a dozen times :-) Thanks a lot. (Your explanation was missing one step: After right clicking, you have to select Properties from the menu, but that is a minor detail.)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Cleaning up the basement, I found a couple still readable disks from my Win95 days. Scanning through them for anything that should be preserved, I came across one long forgotten program (called C-MAP, but that is not essential here). It certainly would start up under Win10, but only to display a message that it can only be run in a 256 palette mode. I remember that there was a setting in WinXP where you could flag an .exe to be run in 256 color mode. Maybe it was still available in Win7; I don't think I ever had the need then, and never knew. I have been searching all over the place in Win10, with a GeForce 610Ti display card, but can't find any similar setting anywhere. Googling gives me a lot of hints on how to do it, but the options I am told to select is absent from the dialogs - the hints appear to predate both Win10 and Win7. Is there any way to emulate 256 color palette is Win10 with a GeForce display card? Does it depend on the driver, or is the problem with Windows dropping this feature some time ago? My only reasons for running C-MAP are nostalgic ones; I have no real "need" for it. But maybe, deeper down in the pile of old disks, I will find another program with similar 256-color requirements, and this program is needed for rescuing some valuable data files. So I would certainly like to know of a general way to handle it, not for C-MAP specifically.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
Wait, you have hardware that can read disks? As in floppy disks? That's impressive! :-D
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Wait, you have hardware that can read disks? As in floppy disks? That's impressive! :-D
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A Lightweight Thread Safe In-Memory Keyed Generic Cache Collection Service A Dynamic Where Implementation for Entity FrameworkI even got a 5.25" floppy unit! To use it, I have to boot up that old XP machine, and I haven't done that for a couple of years, so I will not guarantee that it will work. The machine even has an IDE hard disk interface, but I was an early adopter of both USB and SATA disks. For the 3.5" floppies: For future proofing, I bought a USB reader. There is a small problem with the old floppies: When you format the floppies, a code indicating which format (360K, 720K, 1.44M) in the boot sector. The major floppy manufacturers started selling 'preformatted' floppies, saving the users several minutes per new floppy. However, several of them did format the disc sectors, but didn't write the format code in the boot sector. DOS and early Windows said 'No format code? We'll have to try to read the floppy with all the alternatives; maybe one will be successful'. Usually it was. At some point in time (most likely in the switch from 16 to 32 bits; I am not sure) Microsoft decided: No! The format code should be there, otherwise the floppy is not formatted according to the standard. We will no more make repeated tries like we used to. In principle, I think that was a wise decision. But it left me with a large number of floppies reporting 'Disk is not formatted - do you want to format it?' I was thinking of learning to write a floppy disk driver to do that myself, but none of the floppies were important enough to justify the effort. That XP machine could probably be booted with DOS, but even that is too much effort :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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I even got a 5.25" floppy unit! To use it, I have to boot up that old XP machine, and I haven't done that for a couple of years, so I will not guarantee that it will work. The machine even has an IDE hard disk interface, but I was an early adopter of both USB and SATA disks. For the 3.5" floppies: For future proofing, I bought a USB reader. There is a small problem with the old floppies: When you format the floppies, a code indicating which format (360K, 720K, 1.44M) in the boot sector. The major floppy manufacturers started selling 'preformatted' floppies, saving the users several minutes per new floppy. However, several of them did format the disc sectors, but didn't write the format code in the boot sector. DOS and early Windows said 'No format code? We'll have to try to read the floppy with all the alternatives; maybe one will be successful'. Usually it was. At some point in time (most likely in the switch from 16 to 32 bits; I am not sure) Microsoft decided: No! The format code should be there, otherwise the floppy is not formatted according to the standard. We will no more make repeated tries like we used to. In principle, I think that was a wise decision. But it left me with a large number of floppies reporting 'Disk is not formatted - do you want to format it?' I was thinking of learning to write a floppy disk driver to do that myself, but none of the floppies were important enough to justify the effort. That XP machine could probably be booted with DOS, but even that is too much effort :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
trønderen wrote:
For the 3.5" floppies: For future proofing, I bought a USB reader.
When my previous employer shut down I salvaged a USB floppy drive from the laptop bag one of our salesguys was using. I didn't even know at the time they existed. Tried it with a few floppies I still had - worked fine. It's been in a drawer since (and given how long I've been at my current employer, that must be close to 20 years now). I think I've used it exactly once, and that was probably to create a .flp file (think .ISO but for diskettes). I checked on Amazon a while ago - they're still out there (the USB readers, that is).
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Cleaning up the basement, I found a couple still readable disks from my Win95 days. Scanning through them for anything that should be preserved, I came across one long forgotten program (called C-MAP, but that is not essential here). It certainly would start up under Win10, but only to display a message that it can only be run in a 256 palette mode. I remember that there was a setting in WinXP where you could flag an .exe to be run in 256 color mode. Maybe it was still available in Win7; I don't think I ever had the need then, and never knew. I have been searching all over the place in Win10, with a GeForce 610Ti display card, but can't find any similar setting anywhere. Googling gives me a lot of hints on how to do it, but the options I am told to select is absent from the dialogs - the hints appear to predate both Win10 and Win7. Is there any way to emulate 256 color palette is Win10 with a GeForce display card? Does it depend on the driver, or is the problem with Windows dropping this feature some time ago? My only reasons for running C-MAP are nostalgic ones; I have no real "need" for it. But maybe, deeper down in the pile of old disks, I will find another program with similar 256-color requirements, and this program is needed for rescuing some valuable data files. So I would certainly like to know of a general way to handle it, not for C-MAP specifically.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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I've always known about this and jumped to answer, but I've never actually had to use it and I have no idea how that is possible. Mostly I'm use to seeing it when trying to make old games run in newer windows versions. I guess the games I've wanted to revive have just never been THAT old. Makes sense, that's like CGA I think. Original King's Quest stuff. I'm pretty sure the recent article from the BBC poste here about computer addicts... I think it shows the exact same game that Tom Hanks is playing at the beginning of Big. It looks CGA.