31–40 of 107 posts
If anyone is interested, I just wrote a simple guide on how to get your own DOS programs up and running with em-dosbox: https://csl.name/post/em-dosbox/ Em-dosbox and emscripten are really amazing projects. An emulator is cross-compiled to JavaScript, which is then JITed in your browser's js VM. It's not only amazing that it works, but also that it runs pretty well (compared to native dosbox, it's only a little bit s…
They should try getting a more modern browser on there. If I remember correctly, while running my hand-me-down Gateway 2000 with Windows 3.11 in 1998, I managed to get Internet Explorer 3 or 4 installed after I downloaded it at a friend's house.
> It turns out a number of fundamental aspects of The Web have changed since this time. I wish they went into more detail what exactly changed and why these browsers no longer work, unless it was the PPP protocol they mentioned that is causing the issue.
1) HTTP 1.0 vs 1.1 and lack of the Host: header, as you've all deduced
2) Additional encoding info tacked on after the Content-type causes parsing issues
3) Many sites now redirect to HTTPS by default. While Netscape 1.0 and Mosaic 1.0 both support HTTPS, it used SSLv1, and well, remember POODLE? :P
Newer versions of these browsers tend to work in native DOSBOX but present problems when running on the web. We're working on it.
Biggest problem right now is that the virtualized dial-up ISP is a bit flaky. For some reason PPP over TCP over Websockets via Trumpet Winsock isn't as rock solid as it should be :P
My first thought on reading this is that we can't be that far off from running MAME and every classic arcade game in a browser. Googled it and sure enough - it's already here courtesy of the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/internetarcade
The vast majority of the games will not run at a playable speed. Heck, a fairly large percentage don't even with the MAME software itself on 4Ghz+ CPUs. MAME's commitment to accurate emulation is amazing.
"This means that somewhere, this instance needs to be connected to a proxy server, which assigns a 10.x.x.x address to the “Windows” machine, and then forwards the connections through. Basically, world’s weirdest, most hipster ISP on the face of the earth." I wonder if there will ever be a business case for things like this. I sit across the hall from a startup that sells mp3 gramaphones, etsy is a huge success, ther…
"This means that somewhere, this instance needs to be connected to a proxy server, which assigns a 10.x.x.x address to the “Windows” machine, and then forwards the connections through. Basically, world’s weirdest, most hipster ISP on the face of the earth." I wonder if there will ever be a business case for things like this. I sit across the hall from a startup that sells mp3 gramaphones, etsy is a huge success, ther…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no doubt in my mind that nostalgia is a permanent phenomenon. Spencer wrote The Faerie Queene in deliberately antique english to appeal to people's nostalgia. And that was more that 400 years ago. There's been a market for classic cars almost as long as there's been cars. How many businesses will carve out a niche in long tail tech is harder to tell. I expect it will be like many things, many enter, few leave…
Nostalgia might be a consistent phenomenon, but surely what we are nostalgia about changes. A 20 year old likely never experienced Windows 3.11 in the first place. That would likely make them view emulating it more of a novelty exercise than a nostalgic one, which anecdotally is a weaker and shorter lived motivator.
Is there something else I'm missing here? We've known that there is a decent mapping from X86 assembly to a subset of javascript for a number of years now. You can even run the entire OCaml stack in the browser, or Doom, or Quake... etc. What's next? Wordperfect in the browser? Visicalc? This is clever and kudos to the guys, but how is this advancing what we already know?
Javascript is fast and flexible. The browser is a credible platform technologically. We can treat it like a VM. Yep...Got it. More than three years ago. https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/graphs/contributors