Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

http://www.win3mu.com/

by unsignedqword • 10 years ago

120 67 10 years ago

win3mu.com

kyberias• 10 years ago

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

mmastrac3• 10 years ago

I think the conversion process is literally just creation of a wrapper that launches the emulator.

jjawssd• 10 years ago

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.

bdcravens2• 10 years ago

Plus he plans on selling it, not giving it away, and it's not open source.

supercoder• 10 years ago

What's wrong with that

thristian• 10 years ago

If you read his development blog-posts, it's mostly a lightweight 80186 emulator, plus forwarding Win16 calls to their Win64 equivalents; he's not re-implementing Windows from scratch.

frik• 10 years ago

Will it use Wine (or Wine code)?

TazeTSchnitzel5• 10 years ago

No, it's completely separate. Wine already supports Win16 apps IIRC.

lbenes3• 10 years ago

Yes, Wine implements the Win16 API. I just tried tetris and ski and the both worked fine in wine-1.9.22 (Staging). Didn't even need to even create a 32-bit profile.

mmastrac3• 10 years ago

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.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 10 years ago

Also, Wine already exists. If Wine is ported to run on Windows, this project is redundant, I'd assume?

(In fact, it strikes me now that if you're on Windows 10, you could probably run Wine on the WSL.)

mmastrac3• 10 years ago

His approach is a bit different as he is shimming 16 bit APIs to their 64-bit equivalent. Wine reimplemented them to run on top of a POSIX environment.

His approach will result in higher fidelity for apps as they are basically running on Win64, just with a 16-bit virtual machine driving it.

Wine apps running on Windows would likely feel non-native as the UI components are reimplemented from scratch.

scrollaway3• 10 years ago

Wine already does run on Windows (not well), no WSL needed. Some users already use it to play old games that only run on Win 98 for example.

amyjess2• 10 years ago

16-bit applications can't run in long mode (i.e. a 64-bit OS), so you'll need a 32-bit OS to run these apps in WINE. WINE is just a shim and a library reimplementation, not an emulator, so it just passes the instructions on to the CPU, and you're limited by what the CPU can do.

Hmm... I wonder if you can run 16-bit applications in WINE on a 32-bit VirtualBox VM running on a 64-bit Linux system. That sounds like overkill, though. Might as well just use PCem or DOSbox, depending on your use case (PCem: cycle-accurate emulation of a whole PC, including specific hardware models and running any OS a real PC could; DOSbox: playing some old games for fun).

TBH, I'm not sure what win3mu's point is, either: it probably won't be open-source, and right now the only reason to not use PCem or DOSbox is if you don't own a legitimate copy of Win3.1 and you're not willing to pirate it. An open-source clone of Windows 3.1 that can run any Win16 program in long mode (by interpreting the instructions like an actual emulator) would be a great idea, but this isn't it.

rhabarba• 10 years ago

Win3mu seems to be an emulator, Wine does not.

rasz_pl2• 10 years ago

One source of revenue might be GOG? Shipping Windows 3.11 wrapped in dosbox is impractical :). https://www.gog.com/forum/general/16bit_era_windows_31_mpc_c...

mrpippy• 10 years ago

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.

qwertyuiop9245• 10 years ago

Most games quit windows to gain the extra RAM, AFAIK. It wasn't until Windows 95, DirectX, and Windoom that Windows gaming caught on.

Or am I wrong?

phs318u• 10 years ago

You are correct.

WorldMaker• 10 years ago

Also, there was a transitionary predecessor to DirectX that some (primarily edutainment) games released for Windows 3.1 (and for a short while into early Windows 95) called WinG. So far as I know most of the WinG games also relied on Win32s to get access to 32-bit code, but I don't know if Win32s was a requirement to build a WinG game or if there were 16-bit games for that platform too.

networked2• 10 years ago

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

networked2• 10 years ago

s/in /at /

While you wait for Delphi 1, note that you can already obtain Microsoft's 16-bit Visual C++ compiler and linker at no cost (the same does not apply to 16-bit Visual Basic) and that Open Watcom has been released under an OSI-approved, if weird, license. This tutorial goes into more details: http://www.transmissionzero.co.uk/computing/win16-apps-in-c/.

qwertyuiop9245• 10 years ago

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.

voltagex_4• 10 years ago

Or, a really interesting project plus a great series of blog posts.

From the FAQ on the author's site:

Is it open source, can I contribute? >Thanks, but no thanks. This project was started as a personal challenge/learning exercise. To have others contribute would defeat the purpose right now.

Which I don't quite agree with (why not just not accept pull requests?), but it's fair enough.

qwertyuiop9245• 10 years ago

That would be fine, but he's charging for it. If you're charging for something, it has to be better than free offerings. But this isn't.

Jaruzel2• 10 years ago

It's specifically aimed at old Windows Games, of which there are many. It's not for old 16bit DOS games like Monkey Island or Elite for example.

So people out there have stacks of old CDs with freeware Windows Games on them (popular on the covers of the Magazines of the time) - this project would nicely re-open the use of these games.

Additionally, if he completes this, then there is a also a LOT of old 16 bit productivity and encyclopedia type software that never made the jump to 32 bit.

qwertyuiop9245• 10 years ago

...But DOSBox and wine play all of this software better than this thing does. It had well-established, free, more compatable competition.

This would be inconsequential if this was a free utility which wasn't being sold as a commercial product, but it's not. It's a full commercial product, and if it's not better than freeware in it's main focus area, that's a problem.

lifeisstillgood• 10 years ago

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

rasz_pl2• 10 years ago

job at Microsoft which was

hot patching and shims is still a thing in W10

skissane• 10 years ago

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.)

vortico• 10 years ago

What is with that horrible music in his promo video?

Retr0spectrum• 10 years ago

I wouldn't go as far as to call it horrible, but it definitely wasn't what I was expecting.

renaudg• 10 years ago

To each their own, I find it great !

That 80s sound is back in force at the moment (under the "synthwave" moniker). Think Stranger Things OST.

Also, this one fits the Windows 3 nostalgia theme nicely (okay, not quite 90s music but still retro)

Keyframe2• 10 years ago

Retro tune for retro OS?

bane• 10 years ago

hmm, I found the music so good I went and tracked down the artist and bought their album. http://fm84.bandcamp.com/

cheez• 10 years ago

Ditto

Keyframe2• 10 years ago

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.

g051051• 10 years ago

I have one I'd love to use but it's no longer usable even under a VM. It's an audio mixing game called "No World Order" put out by Todd Rundgren back in 1993. It was a Windows 3.1 app, but remarkably worked up until I switched to Windows 7 64-bit. Even then, I could get it to work reasonably well with Windows XP in a VMware VM. Sound and graphics compatibility have never been a big priority for VMware, and the most recent VMware Workstation update seems to have broken the audio to a degree that I can't play the game anymore. I'm going to try VirtualBox at some point, but it's increasingly difficult to get a new Windows XP system up and running.

Fej• 10 years ago

Try DOSBox.

SmellyGeekBoy• 10 years ago

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.

degenerate• 10 years ago

I'd be fine if it stayed closed source and cost a few bucks to start, and then went open source after the initial revenue stream dried up.

Right now I run a WinXP virtual machine to play SimAnt and SimTower... I know nothing about VMs and was able to get everything installed and working in about 2 hours. So "messing with" virtual machines is not too much time, other than downloading and installing them.

Seeing as the Windows 3.1 crowd would be very niche, they'd most likely have no problem paying a small fee. I just hope it does go open source afterward.

cpcallen• 10 years ago

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

Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

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