Snap will only give lots of resolution choices if using a supported chipset whereas Panorama can patch some video BIOS's to add more resolutions. In short don't bother with Snap unless you have a supported chipset (see readme in the Snap directory).
You will probably get better performance with 64K colours, only half the amount of memory involved. I see this on real hardware playing videos in the browser.
VirtualAddressLimit really depends on your hardware as IBM never really added the logic to tell where system memory ends and hardware memory starts. I've successfully used 3072 on various systems, this one got funky until I lowered it to 2560. Generally 2048 should be fine but there is a bug in the kernel where if you load DLLs high, the shared memory doesn't get released, easy to see in Theseus, hard to get more then a few days of uptime if you're opening and closing things like the browser if they're set to load DLLs high. We do only have 512MBs minus system use, so about 300MB, of lower memory.
The hardware is a VM in this case. The 64K colors really does look worse than 16M for photos. Even the default ArcaOS logo looks worse. The gradients don't look good. But there is clearly a problem at 3840x2160x32bpp .
OK, I agree that 16M colours look better. This is my main system and I need to be able to play videos so I compromise.
On bare metal, I have only nVidia video cards (many different models) and apparently Panorama cannot patch the BIOS on those either, so it is quite limited unfortunately, much more so than what I'm getting in a VM.
It still seems to me that SNAP should be able to use all the resolutions that the VESA VBE BIOS supports, which includes the custom ones for the Virtualbox VM. Somehow, Panorama can do this, and GENGRADD does this (at least on ECS), but SNAP seems to have a hardcoded set of resolutions, and nothing else works, even with GAMON / GACTRL . Anyway, I don't need 3 video drivers to work - just one is fine.
Testing on my T42 (ATI Mobility Radeon 7500), the stock SNAP doesn't give too many choices, but the Arca Noae Snap allows up to 2048x1536x16M with 32 MBs of video ram. Kind of irritating using it with a 1024x768 monitor but it works well. I believe you need a supported chipset to use wide resolutions.
I don't think the amount of RAM is really in an issue for the OS/2 VM, whether it's 1GB or 3GB. This is a 32-bit OS that used to run just fine with <64MB of RAM. 1GB of RAM really is plenty. Maybe only browsers are pushing the envelope these days. I haven't checked how much Firefox consumes. Is there another lighter weight browser available ?
This is about address space, not amount of ram. At one point I needed the whole 3GBs of address space to link a debug xul.dll and with only 1.5GB of real ram, even found the swapper limit of 2GB. Gave me a swap file full error and crash with lots of room, they should have used a larger type or at least unsigned:)
Firefox can use a lot of ram. It tries to allocate in high memory first. There's also the shared memory issue where loading the DLLs, especially xul.dll, into high memory helps. As mentioned, the kernel has a bug and doesn't release this memory so after a few restarts, the system will go down. I resurrected the old mozturbo for this issue, keeps the DLLs loaded and helps a lot.
There are a couple of QT4 based browsers available, they're old. Look on Netlabs, Qt4 apps.
What I would really like to get to work is SMP in the guest. It seems some people have succeeded with VMWare. I won't be trying that today, though
Also, apparently there is a shared clipboard feature for Virtualbox.
It is referenced here :
https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/EComStation_2.x_as_a_VirtualBox_5.x_Guest#Shared_Clipboard
Are they talking about the Virtualbox OS/2 guest additions ? If so, which driver ? I believe I have all the additions installed in my ArcaOS VM, but shared clipboard doesn't work.
Edit: yes, it's the guest additions, which I already have. But there is a checkbox in the VM setting also, which I wasn't aware of. It works now.
Or are they referencing something else that's for ECS only ? Either way, I have an ECS 2.0 license and key, and an ECS 2.0 VM too. I haven't tried the additions in that VM yet.
Weirdly, there was 2 guest additions updates at about the same time. the official which I assume you have, were done by Bird (Knut St. Osmunson) who did the OS/2 libc for Mozilla 1.5 and is the vbox build system maintainer at Oracle, and Valery. There's a recent thread (the one you referenced?) here on Valery's additions. They've both got positives and negatives.