use the Pentium MMX or slower, Id think a Pentium Classic would be perfect for 3.1 with 32mb of ram and a nice 2d card.

I'm with candle_86's recommendation. The most demanding 3.11 game I've ever installed is probably Civ II.

The Voodoo1 is an accelerator, not a GPU. What is the actual GPU on that machine? Neither the Voodoo5 nor the X800 have 3.11 drivers. The Voodoo3 does, but I'd only consider putting 3.11 on such a fast machine if dual booting. The MMX is perfect as long as its 2D card has good 3.11 drivers.

Ups i forgot the graphics card.
The whole machine:
Asus P5A (ALi Aladdin V)
Pentium MMX P55C
1x 64MB Siemens 100MHz SDRAM (PC-100)
Diamond Stealth III S540 S3 Savage4 Pro AGP rev1.2
3dfx Voodoo 1 Diamond Monster 3D
Sound Blaster Pro 2 CT1600

If this is a good Win 3.11 (WfWG) machine i need a good network card also - recommendations?

By the way - I have a lot of pixel to fill: Sony GDM-FW900 😊

Network cards aren't terribly annoying, other than if you need to configure pre-PnP cards. It all depends on the chipset - DEC Tulip, various 3coms, Intel, NE2000, etc.

Also - Windows 3.x on that CRT? Badass. Did you lift it?

@calvin, did i lift it = see avatar 😉

I have used a Savage4 card with 3.11 in the past (dual booting on a P3) and it worked fine. Even those cheap Realtek PCI cards should work fine on WfW too, but a lot of people seem to favour Intel cards.

I need to check my archaeological PC collection 🤣
There are some 3coms and a Intel but most are 10-Mbit/s i believe.
Is there a GigE card that works in 3.11?

Also i think it's easier to use a swap drive because of the FAT stuff.
What raises the next questions:
1. Max partition size for 3.11? I mean not what 3.11 can formate. I mean what is usable. For formating there are other tools.
2. It would be nice to use SATA drives. But looking on Amazons reviews when it comes to adapters they all have problems?

Your Pentium MMX machine is quite OK as many others suggested. For the graphics adapter, considering you will use it only for non 3D games (Windows 3.11 and you already have a Voodoo in the system), I would suggest a Matrox Millenium II (8MB RAM, upgradable to 12MB, so, supports high resolution true color modes, excellent Windows 3.x support, very high quality 2D output). Probably your Savage is also ok, but I have not much personal experience with that card.

10Mbit is not your only in option in theory, since there are 100Mbit 3Coms (905 series) all around and they have excellent WFW 3.11 support. Realteks and Intels are also suggested by many, but unfortunately I have no personal experience with them (my only Realtek is 10Mbit and I have no Intels). I don't know any gigabit cards with WFW 3.11 drivers, though.

2GB is the maximum partition size that Windows 3.x "supports" under normal conditions. Actually this limit comes from MS-DOS 6.22, Windows works with any partition, the DOS version it works on will support. It's possible to install WFW 3.11 on top of a newer DOS version to support FAT 32, hence larger partitions (like MS-DOS 7.1 that came with Windows 98) but this requires some tweaks and actually I don't think it adds much value. SATA drives? I again, against the idea. If you really need to use them, then I suggest utilizing SATA to IDE adapters, not SATA controller cards.

DOS and Matrox is not a good combination: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

I was talking about the SATA to IDE adapters where reviews are not really good.
But before you wrote it i thought about a SATA controller because the ASUS P5A and also my ASUS P3B-F have no 48-bit LBA.
But looks like there is no SATA controller with DOS, 3.x or Win95 drivers.
I have a IDE Promise FastTrak 100 TX2 that has Win95, Win98 drivers.
The Promise Ultra 133 TX2 has DOS and 3.x drivers.
But also with this drivers i would need SATA to IDE adapters.

Biggest cheap IDE HDDs i can find are 320GB WD Caviar Blue.
But also with this drives i need IDE controllers because of the BIOS.

MrGlasspoole wrote:

DOS and Matrox is not a good combination: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ […]
Show full quote

DOS and Matrox is not a good combination: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

I was talking about the SATA to IDE adapters where reviews are not really good.
But before you wrote it i thought about a SATA controller because the ASUS P5A and also my ASUS P3B-F have no 48-bit LBA.
But looks like there is no SATA controller with DOS, 3.x or Win95 drivers.
I have a IDE Promise FastTrak 100 TX2 that has Win95, Win98 drivers.
The Promise Ultra 133 TX2 has DOS and 3.x drivers.
But also with this drivers i would need SATA to IDE adapters.

Biggest cheap IDE HDDs i can find are 320GB WD Caviar Blue.
But also with this drives i need IDE controllers because of the BIOS.

Sorry about the misunderstanding, I was thinking that your focus on Windows 3.1 / 3.11 and not on DOS (i.e. DOS games). Millenium and similar cards from Matrox are one of the best when it comes to Windows 3.1/3.11. In addition to this, "DOS issues" of Matrox cards are something of an exaggeration. Check the sheet you linked, about the details of the "red cells", you will decide if these problems are important for you or not.

Again, maybe another misunderstanding on my side, but you probably need to be looking for "smaller" HDDs (maybe even CF cards - they are in use by many people in DOS/Windows 3.x environments), since under normal conditions, your partitions will be 2 (two) GB max.

There are many people (including myself) using IDE to SATA adapters (the cheap Chinese ones) to utilize modern SATA disks (using SeaTools or similar first, to downgrade them to 32GB or something, to eliminate non-48bit LBA problem) in old systems without problems. So, these "problems" you see on the "reviews" probably also a bit exaggerated.

The MMX P55C is my Voodoo 1 DOS machine and it should stay this way.
We where talking about dual-boot (or swappable HDD) so it has to work in DOS and 3.11 - so Matrox is not an option.

MrGlasspoole wrote:

The MMX P55C is my Voodoo 1 DOS machine and it should stay this way.
We where talking about dual-boot (or swappable HDD) so it has to work in DOS and 3.11 - so Matrox is not an option.

Dual boot DOS and Windows 3.11? Now I understand that you are way above my level of knowledge. Sorry to bother you, god speed. 🤣

MrGlasspoole wrote:

The MMX P55C is my Voodoo 1 DOS machine and it should stay this way.
We where talking about dual-boot (or swappable HDD) so it has to work in DOS and 3.11 - so Matrox is not an option.

Shouldn't need dual boot - since Windows 3.1 runs on top of DOS, you just need a DOS boot menu to prepare a suitable environment.
For Windows 3.1, you MUST have HIMEM.SYS, you can have EMM386.SYS, and you really want SMARTDRV (can do without in WfWg 3.11 as vcache takes over, SMARTRV only needed to cache CD).

Any HIMEM/EMM386 DOS setup should be able to run Win3.1

I know 3.x is just a graphical shell but i like to separate things.
What i don't understand is why there are 3.x games if everything is DOS?
For example King's Quest 6 has a different interface and high-res character portraits in the Windows 3.1 release.

MrGlasspoole wrote:

I know 3.x is just a graphical shell but i like to separate things.
What i don't understand is why there are 3.x games if everything is DOS?
For example King's Quest 6 has a different interface and high-res character portraits in the Windows 3.1 release.

Technically you can't dualboot DOS and Windows 3.11. What you'd have to do is dualboot two copies of DOS, then instal 3.11 in one of them. A bit wasteful, but its not like HD space is a concern nowadays.
Also, not "everything is DOS". AFAIK KQ6 has a Windows version, which is a Windows application and uses its GDI (or was it WinG?) subsytem instead of talking to the hardware directly. Some games were actually released as 16-bit Windows software - I think Civilization was one of them, and so were SimCity and SimCity 2000.

The REMOVED collection has 1,089 Windows 3.x games.
Thats the reason I'm interested the first time in 3.x.

Ok, playing around in VMWare to get the feel of it first.

I was reading that the Windows NT 3.51 Server CD has WfW 3.11 with integrated TCP/IP-Stack on it?
So before i get me a copy of NT 3.51 Server i wanted to check it out and downloaded a iso.
There is a WFW folder - but how do you install 3.11 from that CD?

Also what i normally to with 98 is:

1mkdir c:\Win98
2copy d:\Win98 c:\Win98
3c:\Win98
4setup.exe

This way you never need the CD. Is that possible with 3.11?
Is there a way to make a CD from all the 3.11 disks?

You can just run the setup from that directory if you have working CD drivers, or just copy the setup folder to your hard drive and run from there. (It's the same story with any version of Windows.)