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Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

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Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#41

Post by voltagex_ »

scrollaway wrote: post #40
lnternet wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? (Are you referring to the use of software like Colinux and Andlinux? Those only worked on 32-bit systems last time I checked...)

I haven't been involved with Wine in a long time but the Wine test suite itself is regularly run on Windows: https://test.winehq.org/data/ Here's an admittedly very old article by Dan Kegel on how to compile it on Windows: http://www.kegel.com/wine/wow.html But yeah, I don't think it's explicitly supported since it's not their target market :) Codeweavers' focus is running Windows apps on Mac and Linux (Crossover - g…

What's the difference between Wine, Crossover and PlayOnLinux?

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#42

Post by voltagex_ »

lbenes wrote: post #30
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What distro are you on? I always find it difficult to use newer Wine versions on Debian.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#43

Post by scrollaway »

voltagex_ wrote: post #41
scrollaway wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't been involved with Wine in a long time but the Wine test suite itself is regularly run on Windows: https://test.winehq.org/data/ Here's an admittedly very old article by Dan Kegel on how to compile it on Windows: http://www.kegel.com/wine/wow.html But yeah, I don't think it's explicitly supported since it's not their target market :) Codeweavers' focus is running Windows apps on Mac and Linux (Crossover - g…

What's the difference between Wine, Crossover and PlayOnLinux?

Crossover is a commercial version of Wine which includes a bunch of extra hacks for popular applications. It comes with support. It's how the Wine project pays salaries.

PlayOnLinux is a Wine wrapper which has preset configurations (best known working wine version and dll overrides) for a ton of popular games/software. Think of it like a virtualenv on steroids.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#44

Post by rossy »

supercoder wrote: post #22
bdcravens wrote: post #5

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

There's an argument to be had about FOSS vs. proprietary software in general, but I think it's pretty clear when it comes to emulators. There is something wrong with closed-source emulators. Everyone who develops an emulator for a platform is working towards the common goal of preserving the software that runs on that platform so that people can continue to use it well into the future. All emulators build on research about the platform that has come before them, but if they don't release their source code, they don't advance the state of the art themselves. They're only useful for as long as they're actively developed and their closed-source binaries are compatible with modern operating systems, which means they haven't contributed to preservation of the platform.

Also, it's not like proprietary emulators are neutral towards the goal of preserving their platform, they can actually be detrimental to this goal. If Win3mu becomes more popular that QEMU/Wine, users will raise bug reports against Win3mu and certain issues will be fixed only in Win3mu. When the Win3mu dev loses interest or the platforms that Win3mu runs on become obsolete, those fixes will be lost. God forbid people will have to start running emulators on emulators when the best emulator for a certain platform stops being compatible with modern operating systems.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#45

Post by amyjess »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #9
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.)

16-bit applications can't run in long mode (i.e. a 64-bit OS), so you'll need a 32-bit OS to run these apps in WINE. WINE is just a shim and a library reimplementation, not an emulator, so it just passes the instructions on to the CPU, and you're limited by what the CPU can do.

Hmm... I wonder if you can run 16-bit applications in WINE on a 32-bit VirtualBox VM running on a 64-bit Linux system. That sounds like overkill, though. Might as well just use PCem or DOSbox, depending on your use case (PCem: cycle-accurate emulation of a whole PC, including specific hardware models and running any OS a real PC could; DOSbox: playing some old games for fun).

TBH, I'm not sure what win3mu's point is, either: it probably won't be open-source, and right now the only reason to not use PCem or DOSbox is if you don't own a legitimate copy of Win3.1 and you're not willing to pirate it. An open-source clone of Windows 3.1 that can run any Win16 program in long mode (by interpreting the instructions like an actual emulator) would be a great idea, but this isn't it.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#46

Post by g051051 »

Keyframe wrote: post #34

Are there still apps for Windows 3 people would use on modern OS'? I'm under the impression you would run a VM if you really must, until/if when you make a transition.

I have one I'd love to use but it's no longer usable even under a VM. It's an audio mixing game called "No World Order" put out by Todd Rundgren back in 1993. It was a Windows 3.1 app, but remarkably worked up until I switched to Windows 7 64-bit. Even then, I could get it to work reasonably well with Windows XP in a VMware VM. Sound and graphics compatibility have never been a big priority for VMware, and the most recent VMware Workstation update seems to have broken the audio to a degree that I can't play the game anymore. I'm going to try VirtualBox at some point, but it's increasingly difficult to get a new Windows XP system up and running.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#47

Post by amyjess »

rossy wrote: post #44
supercoder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with that

There's an argument to be had about FOSS vs. proprietary software in general, but I think it's pretty clear when it comes to emulators. There is something wrong with closed-source emulators. Everyone who develops an emulator for a platform is working towards the common goal of preserving the software that runs on that platform so that people can continue to use it well into the future. All emulators build on research…

> God forbid people will have to start running emulators on emulators when the best emulator for a certain platform stops being compatible with modern operating systems.

Sadly, this is already happening. bZSNES is actually a thing now, since so many popular SNES romhacks will only run in ZSNES (i.e. not on real hardware, and not on a more accurate emulator like Snes9X or Higan), but ZSNES is written in 32-bit x86 assembly and contains a massive security hole that's been known for a while but hasn't been fixed.

It's even described as "a portable ZSNES emulator".

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#48

Post by Fej »

g051051 wrote: post #46
Keyframe wrote: post #34

Are there still apps for Windows 3 people would use on modern OS'? I'm under the impression you would run a VM if you really must, until/if when you make a transition.

I have one I'd love to use but it's no longer usable even under a VM. It's an audio mixing game called "No World Order" put out by Todd Rundgren back in 1993. It was a Windows 3.1 app, but remarkably worked up until I switched to Windows 7 64-bit. Even then, I could get it to work reasonably well with Windows XP in a VMware VM. Sound and graphics compatibility have never been a big priority for VMware, and the most r…

Try DOSBox.

Re: Win3mu – Windows 3 Emulator

#49

Post by [deleted] »

bdcravens wrote: post #5
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.

[deleted]
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