Live data from Hacker News

Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

win3mu.com

21–30 of 70 posts

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#21
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.

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.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#22
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.

What's wrong with that

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 98 perhaps. 2000 if generous.

Yes, they have the “Windows Classic” look and feel.

I find it a bit amusing that were they to "update" their look to that of the flat Windows 8+ UI, it would probably entail the removal of a lot of code.

...and yet even on a 25MHz 386, no one complained about the slow drawing speed of the "fancy" 3D buttons in Win3.x.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 98 perhaps. 2000 if generous.

Yes, they have the “Windows Classic” look and feel.

Wine actually has (mostly) functional theming support-- point Wine to a .msstyles theme DLL and it'll draw themed controls (rather than the Windows Classic style default).

They just don't ship a theme with Wine; understandable for licensing reasons (they can't distribute Microsoft's designs), but it means that Wine looks like Windows 2000 out of the box.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's wrong with that

What's wrong is that nobody would pay for this. DOSBox and Wine both work fine, and are free.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's wrong with that

Nothing, but if you read the other comments, people here are worried that he's over-estimating the market size. But we all wish him the best. Hopefully, he's either done his due diligence or he's primarily in it for the fun.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they have the “Windows Classic” look and feel.

I find it a bit amusing that were they to "update" their look to that of the flat Windows 8+ UI, it would probably entail the removal of a lot of code. ...and yet even on a 25MHz 386, no one complained about the slow drawing speed of the "fancy" 3D buttons in Win3.x.

Well, modern flat design generally also includes a much more animated interface, which would probably entail the addition of much more code. And I don't think the drawing speed of buttons was ever a very strong reason for the rise of flat design - though I completely understand your distaste for it.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#30
post #4

Will it use Wine (or Wine code)?

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

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.
Post reply on HN