from Hacker News

Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

by unsignedqword on 11/13/16, 6:48 PM with 67 comments

• by mmastrac on 11/13/16, 7:34 PM

  This is an awesome project. I highly recommend reading through his series on Medium (eg https://medium.com/@CantabileApp/implementing-window-messagi...)

  That being said, I think he is overestimating the market that would pay for this. This seems like it could attract at least a small community as an open source project, however. Unfortunately effort in development is not always rewarded with monetary gain.

  Perhaps he should license it as GPL3 and offer commercial licenses? He may find some customers in software houses that are still selling Win16 software.

• by lifeisstillgood on 11/13/16, 9:17 PM

  This seems ... insane. Good insane, learn-me-a-lot in-the-weeds insane but insane nonetheless

  In the "why?" Section he mentions how a lot of programs don't run due to the quirks of the Windows API, and he is twiddling things to fix them.

  Raymond Chen in "the old new thing" (#) documents his job at Microsoft which was to basically ensure windows handled crappy API calls that third party secs would make and any upgrades or alterations would break. They explicitly added code to windows like "if running adobe XXX then make our API call YYY perform differently and not return a Null"

  This was a huge Microsoft department working over many years.

  You flat out cannot emulate the Windows API. You just can't.

  And all to run games that people today will find amusing for less time than it takes a Venti latte to get cold.

  I wish him luck and happiness :-)

  (#) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

• by mrpippy on 11/13/16, 7:52 PM

  I was a Mac user and didn't play PC games until the Win32 era, but were there very many games for Win16? I thought that targeting DOS was still common well into the Win95 years.

• by qwertyuiop924 on 11/13/16, 8:43 PM

  So, it's a closed source implementation of an API for an old OS/Windowing system atop DOS. Despite the fact that both DOSBox and Wine will run them fine.

  And it's aimed at gaming, but most games quit windows and just ran on straight dos, so DOSBox is a better option anyways, especially considering that you're expecting me to pay for this, even though you've already said the compatability isn't great, and Wine and DOSBox are free and both have excellent compatability.

  Sorry, not interested.

• by Keyframe on 11/13/16, 11:01 PM

  Are there still apps for Windows 3 people would use on modern OS'? I'm under the impression you would run a VM if you really must, until/if when you make a transition.

• by networked on 11/13/16, 8:34 PM

  If you have connections in Embarcadero/Idera Software, now is the time to convince them to release Delphi 1 as freeware.

• by SmellyGeekBoy on 11/14/16, 9:44 AM

  I've been following the blog posts with great interest but I don't understand the move to turn it into a commercial project. I just don't think there's enough demand, especially for games (how many Win31-specific games were there?)

  Where this would be incredibly useful would be for a lot of industrial automation, POS and other commercial software still stuck on Win31. Seems like it would make more sense to release an open source version and then add stuff like raw serial/parallel support as commercial add-ons to cover these cases.

  Still, I don't blame Brad for wanting to get some return on his investment, he has put in a huge amount of work and it looks like a very well thought out and executed project.

• by kyberias on 11/13/16, 7:18 PM

  This is awesome. What does the conversion process do to the executables? Is that part necessary?

• by skissane on 11/13/16, 9:22 PM

  I use Windows 3.1 a lot, mostly to play Solitaire. (Yeah, I could play a newer Solitaire implementation, but I like the nostalgia.) Also, my 3 year old son uses it for Paintbrush and Write - again, I get some nostalgia watching him using Windows 3.1 (although I myself didn't start using Windows until I was 9 or 10).

  This is a cool idea, but running the real thing under VirtualBox appeals to me more. (Although it is slightly screwy - full-screen mode DOS boxes corrupt the display - due to using svgaptch to patch svga256.drv to support higher resolutions and colour.)

• by cpcallen on 11/14/16, 1:24 PM

  It amuses me that the Win3mu logo appears to be using an italic version of the font Chicago, the original Mac system font...

• by frik on 11/13/16, 7:30 PM

  Will it use Wine (or Wine code)?

• by jjawssd on 11/13/16, 7:19 PM

  Seems like a whole lot of hassle for little gain. A lightweight virtual machine should play those games perfectly, no? This guy is porting a huge amount of ancient APIs and their bugs too! Insane.

• by vortico on 11/13/16, 10:25 PM

  What is with that horrible music in his promo video?