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Internet Archive Brings Classic Windows 3.1 Apps To Your Browser (google.com)

Posted by timothy on from the time-for-some-jeopardy dept.

The Internet Archive has made it possible for you to make a virtual visit to the wide, wide world of Windows 3.1 games (and other apps, too), via a collection of virtualized images. Jason Scott is the game collector and digital archivist behind the online museum of malware mentioned here a few days ago. "Now," Ars Technica reports, "Scott and his crew have done it again with the Windows 3.X Showcase, made up of a whopping 1,523 downloads (and counting), all running in a surprisingly robust, browser-based JavaScript emulation of Windows 3.1. You'll recognize offerings like WinRisk and SkiFree, but the vast majority of the collection sticks to a particularly wild world of Windows shareware history, one in which burgeoning developers seemed to throw everything imaginable against 3.1's GUI wall to see what stuck." Says the article: A volunteer "really did the hard work" of getting the Windows files required for each DOSBOX instance down to 1.8 MB, and in the process came up with a more centralized version of those files on his server's side, as opposed to kinds that would require optimizations for every single emulated app.

5 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. As I recall, Win 3.1 deserves its own wing by mark_reh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    in the online museum of malware.

  2. Recognize what now? by sjbe · · Score: 1, Interesting

    You'll recognize offerings like WinRisk and SkiFree,

    Umm, we will? I substantially predate Windows 3.1 and I never heard of those applications. Maybe they were a big thing in some circles but certainly nothing most of us would recognize.

    1. Re:Recognize what now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You all should thank Exo for making this happen. He spent the past 3 years and a good sum of his own money buying every crappy win3.1 game/application he could get his hands on. He is the same one that made that MSDOS collection happen as well on archive. He is working with the archive guys to make it work in the browser so everyone can see.

      Make no mistakes here. Some of this stuff is truly terrible. He and I disagree on that point though. I do concede that there probably is some OK stuff in there. But win3.x had a huge mountain of bad stuff in there. There are some gems but they are far and few between. It was not until win95 that people actually made some decent applications for the Win16/32 API.

      Also the discussions people had on how to do this. Kinda funny. I personally did not like the way the collection ended up. As it ended up about 50gig bigger than it should be. But the method he came up with was simple and fairly easy to reproduce. That was key for him even being able to finish it at all. If you think a current Win10 application is a nightmare to move around between boxes. Try a win3.1 program where people would regularly install their own copy of system dlls over existing ones then break the whole shell for everyone else but their program.

  3. Win3.x Win8.x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Those were the days, when Windows did not spy its users and it used navigation components which had some visual clue for their usage. Nowadays the programs must be flat fullscreen bi-color planes which have only huge text and user is left randomly clicking every word to find out which are actually buttons. Current Windows actually emulates the early point-and-click games, where user needed to discover functionality by brute force trial and error.

  4. Re:Can someone explain how it does it? by eXoScoriae · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you google Win3xO, you'll find the collection he took and based this on. I know because I created the collection. I suppose I'm the "volunteer" he mentioned. I built Win3xO by taking individual Windows 3.x installs (running in Dosbox), gutting them of extra crap, and that gets them down to about 25mb, compressed.Then I had to launch into windows and install any versions of Win32, WinG, Quicktime, etc that the game required. I created a handful of "templates" that had the most common configurations to save time. Each game has the original media (cd image, floppy image, or file dump if it was shareware), mounts it, and then launches Win3x. I used a few tricks to automate the launching of the game once Win3x started. Sometimes this was as basic as just putting a shortcut in the startup folder, but that was a final solution when nothing else worked. In general, I wanted win3x to exit when the game/app closed. If you download my version it is about 350gb, but it is all local. It also includes a front end with box scans, screen shots, game descriptions, manuals, etc.... Its compatible with my previous release eXoDOS, which is the same project, but for DOS games. Interestingly, Jason took that one and put it online last year. But because of the method Jason uses, he breaks a majority of the games when he attempts to make them sompatible with his java script dosbox. This is because he didn't take time to actually talk to me first, and he didn't understand how my conf files worked. So he attempted to automate the conf files. The causes speed issues in some cases, and in other cases it simply doesn't call the right executable. Which is my my DOS collection has 5,500 games, but once it got online, it was down to 2,000. I appreciate Jason's work adapting my collections and getting them to more people... but I wish he wasn't such a clown about giving credit to people who actually did the bulk of the work. Not only would it be nice, but it would lead to a better quality output. Something where more than 40% of the games actually worked.