Wasn’t Windows back then dependent on vendor supplied device specific display drivers for anything above basic VGA? There wasn’t a real standard for “SVGA”, and the VBE stuff wasn’t that well supported early on?
The Windows fallback until circa Windows XP was good old 640x480x16.
> Wasn’t Windows back then dependent on vendor supplied device specific display drivers for anything above basic VGA?
In theory, yes, but the reality was starkly different as I recall (I worked there in the late 90s). In my experience, Microsoft was doing a ton of heavy lifting helping vendors with device drivers.
I remember using a 800x600 16 color generic SVGA driver with early Windows (3.11 or 95?).
At registry level, I guess the mode was made mostly standard as a derivate of the 640x480 16 color standard VGA mode. Indeed both modes fit within the 64 kiB segment using 4 layers and matching the 256 kiB of VGA memory.
The Windows fallback until circa Windows XP was good old 640x480x16.