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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.

27 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Apps by Calydor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Strange.

    I don't recall those programs being called apps. Applications maybe, more commonly programs ... but not apps.

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    1. Re:Apps by TheReaperD · · Score: 2

      Remember though, this was in the wild west days of PCs where there didn't seem to be a standard for anything. Sometime I miss those days, then I remember the "fun" of dial-up and move on.

      --
      "Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
    2. Re:Apps by nine-times · · Score: 4, Informative

      Maybe you have a bad memory...?

      I've been working in the IT industry since the early 90s, and the term "app" has been used as a shorthand for "application" since then at least. It has fairly recently taken the connotation of a mobile app, or some other kind of mini-application (web apps?), but that's actually something from the last 10 years. I forget exactly when that started because I have a bad memory too.

    3. Re:Apps by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      Didn't we call them "programs"?

    4. Re:Apps by gtall · · Score: 4, Funny

      The technical term was "proggie".

    5. Re:Apps by nine-times · · Score: 2

      Yes, that too. My understanding (though this was before my time) was that "application" used to refer to the use, whereas "program" was the thing you ran. So "word processing" is an application of your computer, while "Microsoft Word" is the program you use to do that. That was according to my dad, who worked for IBM back in the days of punch cards, but it's possible that was just his own distinction.

      But by the 90s, you could describe Microsoft Word as either an "application" or "program" (or "app"). They were all fairly interchangeable. Admittedly, though, it could have been a regional thing, since we didn't really have the Internet yet (yes, it existed, but it wasn't in heavy practical use for most people).

    6. Re:Apps by Scoth · · Score: 2

      As a kid in the 80s and 90s, "Applications" were the things Dad used to get work done, "Utilities" were boring things that you weren't supposed to touch because you could break the computer, and "Games" were the only fun things. They were all programs, though you sounded like an egghead calling them that.

  2. Can someone explain how it does it? by Viol8 · · Score: 2

    Is the javascript emulating the OS and all applications itself or is the javascript emulating an old PC and then the windows binaries are running on that? I'm guessing the latter since doing the former would be a boatload of work. Impressive whichever way they did it.

    1. Re:Can someone explain how it does it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Javascript run version of dosbox emulating computer to run windows/apps.

    2. 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.

    3. Re:Can someone explain how it does it? by omnichad · · Score: 2

      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.

      I have a great way of doing this. I have several games on my MythTV HTPC that I want to open/close by remote control. And I had to find a way to automate startup of the game and exit of Windows.

      You can add an exe as an argument to win in autoexec.bat and it will run that on startup. I used a recently-created free program called runexit.exe to launch the game. When the game is exited, runexit.exe shuts down Windows.

      So for a game called game.exe, it was:
      win C:\runexit.exe C:\gamepath\game.exe

      This worked great, while trying to run the game as the Windows shell instead of progman.exe just plain didn't work.

  3. Link to the real thing by Ivan+Stepaniuk · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just pick your application to run here:

    https://archive.org/details/so...

    --
    My other signature is a car
  4. As I recall, Win 3.1 deserves its own wing by mark_reh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    in the online museum of malware.

  5. Re:Windows 3.x games? No. by TheReaperD · · Score: 2

    Ah yes, the days of himem.sys and emm386... Most of the time it wasn't so bad but, every now and then you'd have two applications that required mutually exclusive settings. Now that was a pain. DOS was not exactly set up for multi-boot configurations.

    --
    "Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
  6. Re:Recognize what now? by TheReaperD · · Score: 2

    Yea, I can't say I have a lot of Windows 3.x experience either. I preferred working with DOS and only used Windows when I had to until Windows 95 rolled around and it started to resemble something useable.

    --
    "Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
  7. Actual Link by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The actual link to the archive is: https://archive.org/details/so...

  8. Re:Windows 3.x games? No. by DarkOx · · Score: 2

    Actually it was, at least for DOS 6.0 on you could easily have multiple configurations specified in config.sys and autoexec, which could be setup to provide a menu based selection of which configuration you wanted to boot on start up.

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  9. 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.

  10. Re:Wheel of Fortune! by Higaran · · Score: 2

    Skifree, that's all you need, I spent many hours on that game eaten by the snowman a million times.

  11. Re:Recognize what now? by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 2

    " Maybe its a split between those of use who see computers as a tool for work vs those that see them as entertainment."

    I was 16 in 1992. If you were under 8 or over 18, or didn't have brothers or sisters that age at this time, you probably missed this stuff.

    Now you want scary... Skifree came out only 5 years before the debut of Slashdot.... And Slashdot is getting close to 20 years old.

    https://xkcd.com/1393/

  12. Re:Windows 3.x games? No. by The-Ixian · · Score: 2

    Yeah and ISA Plug-n-Pray cards from competing vendors that *would not* work together in the same system... jumper pins, dip switches and manual IRQ settings... oh those were the days...

    --
    My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
  13. Re: Win3.x Win8.x by jones_supa · · Score: 2

    Blame web and mobile app designers and use a Mac while you can, we are going to flat land of GUI design and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

    OS X introduced flat GUI in Yosemite as well...

    Windows 7 and Ubuntu Unity are the remaining ones that still look cool.

  14. Re:Use the preview, dimothy by squiggleslash · · Score: 2

    It's Scandawegian for "Website that doesn't support Unicode and incorrectly validates forms containing unicode", I believe.

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    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  15. Re:Win3.x Win8.x by squiggleslash · · Score: 2

    I'm finding it fairly amusing that Windows 3.x actually looks quite fresh and, ugly pre-anti-aliasing font aside, fairly modern. Which is odd because at the time, as a user of AmigaOS 2.04 at home, I thought it looked clumsy and ugly (and everyone else started to agree about the look of Windows 3.x when Windows 95 came out.)

    There's a lot of flatness to the Windows 3.x UI, which is something that's in vogue again.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  16. 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.

  17. Ah, been done before... by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 2

    http://windowsreallygoodeditio...

  18. On the topic of old software being emulated by Solandri · · Score: 2, Informative

    This site has a bunch of arcade and video games from the 1980s emulated in flash. Those of you who grew up with a NES may be interested in their NES games library.

    The site is a good argument for why (1) copyright on software should be for a shorter duration than for other media, or (2) copyright on software should expire if it hasn't been republished for a decade or two. Unlike an old book which you can pick off the shelf in a library and read, software is pretty useless unless you can actually run it. Unless the copyright owner is actively porting the old software to run on new hardware, it's essentially become abandonware. And only through the work of sites like this (technically illegal under copyright law) can people experience what the software was originally like.