Monochrome Windows 98

A quick run of Windows 98's 2 color VGA mode, covering a few programs like Minesweeper, Internet Explorer, and WinQuake.

You may notice that some icons do have 1-bit versions on hand, but others do not. It seems to be a bit of a half-baked implementation, so I'm surprised an effort was even made to support this mode. I wonder what use cases there would be for monochrome Windows 95/98... gas plasma displays maybe? Even monocrhome CRTs will take any level of color depth, as all they do is connect the green VGA pin and display everything as multiple shades of grey, so accounting for 1-bit graphics likely didn't have much of a practical purpose.

When I say Windows 98, I more specifically mean Redtoast Alpha 3a, a prebuilt environment that strips out the IE shell in favor of the one from Windows 95.

Created on December 24th, 2020
why did windows even have this function? 1-bit color in windows hasn't been of any use since after windows 3.0, yet for some reason some of the bitmap artists at microsoft went through the trouble of drawing some icons optimized for this mode in the age of windows 95. it probably would have been more fun if it wasn't so buggy, and you could set ultra high resolutions. would've been very useful for programmers and plain document authors who need the extra space but can't get a video card with a huge frame buffer. well, maybe if it was 1989, windows was too late

on November 14, 2023, Kugee's website, Razorback, shut down, and hundreds of the best retro tech videos vanished with them. He sent me some nvme drives with raw footage and project files so I can preserve his videos in the best format possible. so this is effectively the official archive of Razorback (and kugee's youtube channel)