Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator • Hacker News Board

Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#1

Post by unsignedqword » Sun, Nov 13, 2016, 6:48 PM UTC

Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator
win3mu.com

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#2

Post by kyberias » Sun, Nov 13, 2016, 7:18 PM UTC

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

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#3

Post by jjawssd » Sun, Nov 13, 2016, 7:19 PM UTC

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.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#4

Post by frik » Sun, Nov 13, 2016, 7:30 PM UTC

Will it use Wine (or Wine code)?

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#5

Post by bdcravens » Sun, Nov 13, 2016, 7:31 PM UTC

jjawssd wrote: post #3

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.

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

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#6

Post by mmastrac » Sun, Nov 13, 2016, 7:34 PM UTC

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.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#7

Post by mmastrac » Sun, Nov 13, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

kyberias wrote: post #2

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

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

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#8

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Sun, Nov 13, 2016, 7:47 PM UTC

frik wrote: post #4

Will it use Wine (or Wine code)?

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

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#9

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Sun, Nov 13, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

mmastrac wrote: post #6

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 h…

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.)

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#10

Post by mrpippy » Sun, Nov 13, 2016, 7:52 PM UTC

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.