The weekend is close, I don't feel like I have energy to work on my little(?) game, so I'm going to try and do the weirdest Windows 3.1 setup out there.

@nina_kali_nina If all else fails, I've recently installed Win 3.11 and Win95 on a 386SX-16 with mTCP's amazing netdrive.

@nina_kali_nina 3.11 on 6.20 > 3.1 on 6.22

@cowman this is 3.11 WfW, despite what the installer says

@nina_kali_nina I installed this combination a few times. During this phase of my life, frequent impressions somehow burned themselves into my brain, so that even today, when I am reminded of them and close my eyes, I can still see them like an afterimage on my retina. A bit like a catchy tune. So thank you for that. 😁

@nina_kali_nina never installed win3.11. thx for reminding me. 486 would be appropriate, yes? :)

First step of getting cool Win 3.1 install these days is VBESVGA driver. Kudos to https://github.com/PluMGMK/vbesvga.drv

I think 16M colours looks pretty great, but it is noticeably slower than 256 colours.

@da_habakuk 386 would work, but it really shines on a 486, yes!

@nina_kali_nina Real hardware? I recently ran Win95/3.11 on a VLB S3 968 with 4MB RAM on 1280x1024x64k and 1600x1200x256 ... in fact ran quite snappy (but I also blame that on the Pentium Overdrive running at 100MHz).

I should still give that driver a try ... the ATI VGA wonder drivers for Win 3.11 never worked on my 386SX-16.

If you follow me, you probably know that there's an open-source clone of Windows NewShell for 3.1 called Calmira. There's a version called Calmira XP, which looks really out of the place on 3.1. But my goal is to get the most unhinged, sick, abominable, overpowered and power-hungry Windows 3.1 install, so here we go.

@nina_kali_nina I wonder if Microsoft ever sent out that FREE Windows newsletter, and if any scans of it exist

@lunte161 for my twisted purposes, I'm running it in a really fast emulator. But I really should've started it on a Pentium 3 I have in storage...

@nina_kali_nina That's ok :) Also have 95/98/XP virtual machines with the later getting some actual use rather often (runs an older Altera Quartus + Programmer since I never upgraded from the LPT Byteblaster)

@lunte161 ha-ha, I know the feeling :< we have a real machine for it

@nina_kali_nina I was there 3000 years ago when Windows 3.1 was unleashed on the world and the age of VESA drivers began.

A bit of a technicality, but it makes a lot of sense in terms of UX: doslfn to add Long File Name support in Calmira, and IFA to add Long File Name support to the basic Windows applications.

And while we're at it, let's get some sort of a wallpaper. This one is 256 colours, because Paintbrush 3.x and Paint 95+ aren't really compatible, and the only way I can convert images to this old system (for now) is ImageMagick gif 256 colours -> pcx -> bmp

@sashabilton except there _wasn't_ a real VESA driver for Windows 3.1 a year ago. The driver I'm using was released on the 15th of December 2024.

@nina_kali_nina am I having false memory syndrome? (3000 years is quite a long time). I have this memory of installing vespa drivers and them scrolling by on startup on my '93 486 DX.

@sashabilton there were SVGA drivers for _some_ cards, but the majority of SVGA cards were released in Win95+ era and didn't have Windows 3.1 drivers. There was a VESA patch for Windows 3.1, but it breaks DOS-mode support and still doesn't work on many cards.

@nina_kali_nina my machine at that point was a homebrew, as I was at uni and building your own computer was a bit of ritual. I seem to remember having a high end graphics card, and I probably had a boot to dos disk config that disabled vesa, to play Master Of Magic in 1994.

Shocking Windows 3.1 development continues. Now I have win32s, which will allow me to run some Win32 applications on top of DOS and Win16 kernel. Freecell looks like any other app, but it is Win32 app, very MVP.

And IE 5.0 is being installed but still needs a bit of tweaking. It has a 128-bit encryption module, but it's useless, because no one supports SSL anymore.

Note WinRAR behind the IE50 installer.

@nina_kali_nina retro ta fupp

@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt also i wonder if you could backport paint 95 to 3.1

@tauon I think it is possible, and I will try.

@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt oh. you can't do that without the source code obviously. which is illegal and i would never suggest illegal things

@tauon you don't need to backport it, you should be able to run it as is with Win32s ;)

@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt oh wait of course, there's that compatibility layer thing, right?

@tauon yep! It's dodgy but I want to push it to the limit for cursed reasons

@nina_kali_nina this is genuinely so cool, I need mainstream UIs/UXs to take a look back into what they used to be.

@nina_kali_nina Don't forget 16-bit Flash plugin, though zombo.com unfortunately doesn't serve the .swf file any more.

@nina_kali_nina "Microsoft VM for Win 3.1/Win NT 3.51" oh goodness, I had no idea that existed... somehow I assumed that the Forbidden JVM™ was exclusive to the 32-bit OSes.

(This is 16-bit IE5, right? Or is IE5 one of the 32-bit applications for which you installed Win32s?)

@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt also, what's with this thing that looks like a jpeg? or did they just convert it to a bmp in a different way

@tauon this is a real BMP, 24bpp. :)

@jernej__s there are sites that still do, but HTTPS is going to be an issue

@dgelessus I know, right? Impressive :) This is a 16-bit IE5; I think 32-bit IE5 requires too much stuff from Windows 98.

@nina_kali_nina Hard to find sites with Flash 3.0-compatible movies though.

@nina_kali_nina Playing along on real hardware ...finally gave Calmira a spin after being aware of it for almost 20 years.

It's taking longer than it should have, but I have working TCP/IP on Windows 3.1, and it plays along with IE 5.0. Google stopped supporting IE5 recently, but I learned about Wiby not that long ago, and I like it.

But we're far from being done.

@nina_kali_nina I don't (yet) follow you, but I do have like two computers with a Win 3.x installed. Unfortunately IIRC Calmira needs a 386 or I'd have put it on the 286 with Win 3.1 :P

(The other 3.x is a WFW 3.11 on a Pentium 233 with 256MB of RAM ... that thing never really runs out of RAM, you just run out the 16-bit segment descriptors, which i just find so funny)

@urja Calmira is written in Pascal, and the sources are available, so it should be possible to recompile it for 286. However, it is very slow even on my 386 machines, so I wouldn't recommend. :)

@lunte161 niiiice! Thanks for sharing! Any cool/sick hacks I should try? :)

@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt woah wiby looks cool
also i suppose google want to cut down on having so many legacy code paths

@tauon they used to take pride in supporting legacy browsers, but it was done by a single volunteer or something. Kind of like Facebook-over-Tor.

@nina_kali_nina Ohh, I’d completely forgotten about my old hobby of editing the registry to add personal messages to the IE title bar!

@h0m54r that's a great hobby!

@nina_kali_nina Have to admit my Win 3.11 expertise is quite limited. MicroMan is a slightly entertaining game tho with an interesting backstory and developer.

@lunte161 oh, I never heard about it! But it looks interesting.

@nina_kali_nina Started out as a techdemo for flicker free animation for Windows and got a modern remake in the early 2000s. Used to be quite popular as a shareware game "back then". The developer later worked on Blood.

@nina_kali_nina install Netscape

Okay, this is the most cursed Windows 3.1 screenshot so far. I'm not saying things are working, but I'm not saying they're not working either. Sort of a limbo.

@Lydie I'm afraid IE5 is superior to any Netscape available on non-NT 3.1 :(

@nina_kali_nina IIRC the application providing TCP/IP on Windows 3.1 was called Trumpet Winsock or something like that, is that what you used?

Edit: It was right there on the screenshot 😀

@nina_kali_nina makes me want to make a NetZero simulator that gives you a random bad banner ad or whatever that you can't remove from your screen in exchange for functional networking. Homebrew malware? hm.

@nina_kali_nina Nice.. I bet it's not as slow as installing Windows 3.0 on a 8086 (640kb).

And against all bets and common sense it actually worked... somewhat (have to be patient while it slowly draw that window, then crunch for a while to display each icon!)

On top of not having enough RAM I still had to load hymem.sys (I think?) that not only did not allow any of that memory above 640kb to be accessed (since it wasn't there) but also reduced the remaining RAM available 🤦

@nina_kali_nina are you familiar with @jwz's "Run Some Old Web Browsers" work? https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-browsers-day/

@nina_kali_nina
Wow, imagine showing this to someone in '92.

Sometimes it feels like Microsoft intentionally made Win32s incompatible with lots of apps (or the other way around). Only Calc and Real Audio player from Windows 95 are working with Win32s - even Freecell doesn't. Despite it being almost the same thing as Freecell shipped with Win32s itself.

@nina_kali_nina OTOH that taskbar looks nothing like what I recall from 3.1...

@dermoth this is Calmira XP, there wasn't any toolbar in 3.1, and that's the point of this pointless exercise :D

@dermoth it doesn't have to be Trumpet, but it works better than the MS winsock.

@dermoth Windows 3 on an XT is a pain, yes. But there is meaning in having himem on a XT: it is possible to have a EMS card, and Windows really, really hoped you'd get it :D

@tedmielczarek @jwz I was not, thanks for sharing!

@FritzAdalis some rich people had SVGA displays in 1992 :) But yeah, impressive

@nina_kali_nina
idk I had svga in '92 and I was broke. It's easy when you make bad financial decisions.

@nina_kali_nina explorer.exe under win32s looks better than progman.exe did under 95-98 (I can't remember if it was present in ME, having never used it (thank Godzilla!))

@avatastic I couldn't run explorer.exe from Win95, perhaps I need a newshell version from NT....

@nina_kali_nina ahhh, there was thread preceding what I replied to.

Of course I should have recognised that as XP (and thusly a clone) rather than 9x explorer.exe.

I'd not expect much, if anything NT based to run under win32s.

Something from OS/2 otoh...

Woah, a CD-based game for Windows 3.1! Released in 1997, "Pilot Bros" comes with win32s on the CD, and has music, video and audio that all work under Windows 3.1. From what I can tell, it is highly inspired by Gobliiins

@nina_kali_nina Wait. You haven't seen this before?

@nina_kali_nina oh my gods

on 3.1

this is the purest - i don't need to tell you, but I'm just saying - of batshittery, well done

it wasn't intentional incompatibility tho', it was that getting win32s to happen _at all_ in a 3.1 framework was a nightmare but we (msft) needed some way to give access to full 32-bit to keep certain classes of app developers interested in windows when NT and 95 weren't even CLOSE to ready

"remember, the 's' stands for 'sux'" comes out of microsoft systems group, i am just telling you

(see also intel 386sx but win32s was, well)

(95 was a whole story in and of itself, team NT was lying a LOT about when they could deliver and 95 kinda started as a rogue project)

my brain hurts just looking at this xD

@nina_kali_nina I guess you could curse the browser with all the malware toolbars you can find or is that too easy?

anyway, with that thought i think i'll leave you with a nos da. (:

@avatastic it would be difficult, because all the malware expects win32! :D I don't think there were any bars supporting IE5 on Win16

@dosnostalgic Correct. I was told that it wouldn't work on our 486 with EGA. I bet the game would complain about the video mode...

@nina_kali_nina Yeah, there could have been a few issues. 🤔

@nina_kali_nina Makes sense that browser extensions wouldn't be made compatible, it'd be a great way to force people into the ActiveX plugin ecosystem.

@moira fair enough, fair enough :D I remember the biggest pain of Win32s vs non-Win32s exe was how dynamic loading was implemented?

@nina_kali_nina I was not directly involved but I knew people who were and yes, that was absolutely part of it. Did learn a lot from the experience, though; that's part of why Win95 worked so well. Win32s may've had the suck but set, but Win95 was a goddamn miracle.

There ended up being a lot of hidden "thunker" DLL layers which would invisibly interact between the two user spaces and serve as translators, and also minimise the number of mode transitions, which was incredibly important for processor architecture reasons. (The mode switching was _not fast_ so if you didn't get _very clever_ with it, you'd drop _so much_ performance on the floor. Minimising mode transitions was critical.)

or that's how I remember it, anyway.

@dosnostalgic the game starts, but the interface doesn't fit on the screen. Typical EGA :<

@nina_kali_nina PARTICULARLY if you had to drop to real mode, which you almost always had to do if you were doing ANYTHING network related. Going to "real" (8088) mode and back was... 100% _yikes_.

@moira at least it wasn't targeting a 286 CPU with no* return from the protected mode :D

@nina_kali_nina no* is the perfect way to put that, yes.

no*

@nina_kali_nina nice saber background

@nina_kali_nina Huh, I didn't know 1С made games too, I had only known about their, uh, other business.

@nina_kali_nina Throwing it out there since it might be a fun addition for a cracked out Win3.11 install

Me and other folks are putting together a whole ass "retro internet" service. Win3.11 and IE 5 are roughly the "minimum level of supported" I've been personally testing

https://wiki.cursedsilicon.net/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net

@nina_kali_nina @Lydie Opera 3.62? :)

@nina_kali_nina I did not know. But now I had to test. This is indeed cursed.

@ltning I should patch the video driver to change the appearance of the UI even further to make it even more cursed xD

@CursedSilicon hmmm, I have much smaller systems, like 8 and 16 bits, would it make sense to access the retro thing you're making from them?

@jernej__s @Lydie 4.0 should work too

@nina_kali_nina how in hell did you get the XP panel in 3.1? Cursed is an understatement!

@nina_kali_nina does https://html.duckduckgo.com/html work? It's HTML only.

@nina_kali_nina I remmeber that Hearts worked.

@justin it is not me, the work is all done by Calmira XP creators. This is basically a thing that is made from scratch in Pascal. IIRC it still worked in Windows 10, so it might be a nice lightweight alternative to JavaScript Start menu in Windows 11.

@justin the problem is usually HTTPS, not HTML versions, but I'll give it a try in a moment.

@meowki yep! The WfW version

@justin yep, html.duckduckgo.com refuses to talk over HTTP

@nina_kali_nina Ah OK. I figured it was JavaScript and the likes.

@nina_kali_nina Ah interesting!

@justin it still works on newer JS-enabled browsers :)

@vestige @nina_kali_nina There‘s a difference, as X11 gives each Window its own palette, opposing to Windows, a standard palette was used for the whole screen and developers could pre-dither their images for perfection.

There are X11 versions that, together with the right apps, deliver a palette that looks like the current window has 16bpp, perfect, obviously the rest of the screen colours glitches out.

@elosha @vestige curiously there is a driver for Windows 3.1 that supports optimal 16 colours on VGA, at the cost of changing the colours of system elements.

Day 2 of abnormal Windows 3.1 functions. Internet Explorer 5 decided to stop working after I tweaked some thing, so it's Netscape Navigator time. It looks so sleek...

(What you're seeing here is Windows 3.1 with Calmira XP shell that adds taskbar and desktop, and a VBESVGA driver)

There is an X11 server for Windows 3.1, but it only supports telnet or rsh. I think some of my X11 apps would have been working, if only my network was working correctly.

While I'm thinking about other unhinged things to do with this half-broken unusual Windows 3.1 install, here's some QuickTime for you.

@nina_kali_nina Speaking of video drivers - is it true that the only way to tell a Windows 3.x driver to use small fonts at high resolutions is to patch the driver itself - meaning that each video driver has to be patched individually?

As you can see the window controls in Win-OS/2 are obscenely large. It uses the same size for everything 1024 and up, so at 1024 the controls take up like a quarter of the screen. :D

@ltning it's not exactly true but not false either; each driver installs their own bitmap system fonts, but it is possible to overwrite the fonts from a different driver on an existing system.

@nina_kali_nina Omg I had to wait 2025 and know this !! When i'll have some time I'll test with a 3.11 VM with TCP/IP or with my real 3.11 computer...!!

As mentioned before, Windows 3.1 has very limited compatibility with 32-bit applications, including Paint from Windows 95. However, it can run Paint from Chicago just fine. It cannot run Chicago's Notepad, but Paint sort of works. Neat.

@scalonnec for the record: I have TCP/IP working, but it is 86 Box SLiRP - I need proper networking, otherwise my VM isn't visible from outside. I have bridging working in Qemu, but Xonnet (and other Win32s apps) doesn't work in Qemu. :< I hope you'll have better result on a real PC!

@nina_kali_nina Cool. Nice Saber-chan desktop BTW. :)

@nina_kali_nina a game of Operation: Inner Space?

https://sdispace.com/index.html

That was still supporting Windows 3.1 in the year 2022

@pulkomandy here we go! it works as promised, and has cute sound effects

@nina_kali_nina Nice! Should also try the 32bit Apps from NT 3.x and 4x 😊

Okay, this totally should count as an abomination. I associate Space Cadet Pinball with Windows XP, because it was not shipped with Windows 95/98 by default.

But this Space Cadet is actually a win32s application from 1995, and works just fine on Windows 3.1. It looks especially "normal" because of Calmira XP adding Windows XP decorations to Win 3.1. The only tell is window title bars. Woah.

@elosha NT 3 NewShell was a flop, and NT 4 is two years newer than Chicago, so I don't have much hopes about it...

@nina_kali_nina would 3D Movie Maker even work on that setup of yours? I'm intrigued by the heck of a monster you created there.

@vestige yup! This is why I don't consider Trumpet and Netscape abominations. IE5 on Win 3 is a bit too much though, and then anything else retrofitted definitely is a stretch :D

@nina_kali_nina @scalonnec Bridging in 86box should work just fine, you just need to install npcap in winpcap-compatible mode.

@Ronflaix it very well might, released in 1995, so there are chances it wasn't using DirectX just yet!

Edit: yes, it's WinG, should totally work on Windows 3.1

@nina_kali_nina
I presently associate Space Cadet Pinball with anything that has a CPU

@jernej__s @scalonnec I'm on Mac OS :<

@ozzelot these days, yeah...

@nina_kali_nina
I would believe someone made a purely 16-bit port because why not :D

@nina_kali_nina @scalonnec PCap should work on macOS, too, according to the docs.

@nina_kali_nina while it's now open source thanks to @foone and al. (https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-3D-Movie-Maker) I don't know if that version of the repo would be helpful to compile a Win16 version.

Though, in my laptop there's still the CD for the French version I kept forgetting I'd eventually dump for Foone. Would that even be helpful in any case for testing?

Edit: should be in the tray. I have to check later

@jernej__s @scalonnec and many other things, too. And yet.

@nina_kali_nina thoroughly enjoying this thread, thanks! :)
So... how come your copy of Netscape is German?
Personal preference, random chance, the only archived version, or something else entirely?

@nina_kali_nina So... Running X11 into Windows 3.11 inside Mac OS
WHAT IS THIS [wonderful] WORLD
😁

@nina_kali_nina I recall using WeirdX on 95 or 98 back then, but do we have a JVM for 3.1? 😅

https://web.archive.org/web/20250220140358/jcraft.com/weirdx/

Okay, I figured out what to do with the network, and I have semi-working X11 on my abomination of Windows 3.1. It is so unstable I had to reboot at least 20 times to take these two screenshots.

I have a question that I have unanswered since 1994. How do you achieve those pseudo-3D look on the forms under windows 3.1? Most of the time they appear boring, white, flat. But some apps like MS Word, somehow, achieve the (I don't really know the name on English) grayish raised 3D windows, with real buttons and widgets.

I was told it's win32s, but I don't remember MS Word being shipped with that.

@beckermatic the buttons are drawn in software, different UI toolkits draw buttons differently. There were at least toolkits from MS and Borland. I suppose Word used something similar!

@usuallyharmless it was on a website with cute win32s applications. I don't mind German versions, I've used German Windows 95 for a short while.

@scalonnec yep :D

@mmu_man we have JVM that is shipped with IE50. I'm not sure if it has everything necessary to run this one....

@nina_kali_nina wait just a second...x11, on windows, whaaaaat?

@esoteric_programmer there is also X11 server for DOS. It only supports old versions of X11, so it's suitable for period-correct access to SunOS and such.

@nina_kali_nina @gothpanda *is reminded of*
http://toastytech.com/guis/misc3.html

@colinstu @gothpanda directly inspired by

@nina_kali_nina I seem to recall there was a compatibility thing one could install in 3.1 that actually increased 32-bit compatibility a lot. WinG I think it was?

@nina_kali_nina May I suggest you try hard mode for the next time? (DR-DOS)

@nina_kali_nina Go for it!

@nina_kali_nina I wonder if it works with freedos as well

@esoteric_programmer I suspect it does, but it's X11R5

@nina_kali_nina this is a delightful thread so far

@hikari ^_^ thanks!

@nina_kali_nina win32s, "windows on windows?" Win32 subsystem? remaps win32 API calls to win16, does the same for callbacks, runs each 32 bit process in its own protected memory space (I think). Was designed so you could write a single app for Windows 3.x and Windows NT 3.1, probably as soon as windows 95 "chicago" shipped they stopped work on it-so any new API call added is missing

Win95 is its own ugly hack considering the kernel itself runs on DOS.

@stevel close but not quite. Win32s cannot overcome win16 kernel limitations, therefore requires programs to have a relocation section, and doesn't offer any stronger protections than original win16 apps have. Win95 is far nicer than Win32s in terms of implementation!

@niavy without any hacks, even. Yeah.

@nazokiyoubinbou WinG is a proto-DirectX thing; it offers fast blits between RAM and VideoRAM; DX in comparison also offers blits between VRAM and VRAM. Win32s offers compatibility, and then there are bonus MFC3.0, OLE2, Shell32 and MSVCRT20+MSVCRT40 with Win32s support - if you look for them.

@nroach44 haha no T_T thanks

@nina_kali_nina Ah, it was Win32S I was thinking of!

Been a long time.

@nina_kali_nina
Such dedication

@nina_kali_nina I associate it with Windows NT 4 because the first time I encountered it was on my father's Windows NT 4 work laptop. 😌

@nina_kali_nina add WinG and you should be able to use the Warcraft 2 level editor 🙂

@nina_kali_nina I might still have a couple games for 3.1... Myst for sure, I'll have to search for more. LMK if You're interested in ISO images...

I have disquettes too, if they even still work. I recall a project to recover old diskettes that used advanced recovery techniques... I still have a few 3.5in drives and an open slot on my computer :)

PM if interested.

@nina_kali_nina Oh wow I had totally forgot about that one!

@nina_kali_nina Next make it run a VM, running Solaris running Internet Explorer ^^
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AoyQeUzbEU

@nina_kali_nina windows with borders that help to distinguish one window from another. Inspiring.

@lunte161 I have a real Solaris machine, so might try it...

I was trying to do something about Java on Windows 3.1, and I sort of did. First things first, JRE doesn't work. Even when forced to install, it doesn't work. It relies on MSVCRT and long file name support in the kernel, which... Is not great. But I won't give up.

Both Netscape 4 and IE 5.0 have Java 1.1 support, so I can run some Java programs if I explain the browsers how to run them.

But there aren't that many Java 1.1 programs, are there...

While I'm thinking about Java on Windows 3.1, here are some more unusual things for my cursed setup: fMSX, an emulator of an MSX/MSX2 home computer, and notGNU - an emacs clone.

There are many interesting programs for Win3.1 I'm skipping for now, like Photoshop, or CorelDraw, or POVRAY and various 3D editors, or MathCad, or AutoCAD...

But those are programs that people used to run "normally". This time I'm trying to find rare gems or do things that most people won't :D

@nina_kali_nina I wonder if you could get the original 2001 release of RuneScape to run in Java 1.1

@CursedSilicon if it used to run on Java 1.1 and available, it would run!

@nina_kali_nina putty and X forwarding ?

@Bredroll ha-ha, no, Putty never worked on Win16, I think.

@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt does this mean you can reexport the wallpaper in glorious full colour

@tauon I can... should I?

@nina_kali_nina *Apparently* (read: Googling it real quick) it needed Java 1.1.5?

Or at least the RS Wiki linked to that version

So maaaaaybe?

@nina_kali_nina hm 0.45 was 1999, i think it only ever supported NT

@CursedSilicon that could be a biiit difficult but I'll see what I can do

@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt it would be cool. might help sell the windows xp look more too

i think there's also a program that lets you edit the icons in the title bar but i can't find it by searching

@tauon the driver is open source, so at least in theory it should be possible to recompile. I can also edit the resources manually. But I don't think resources will look very good...

@tauon I did!

Windows 95 Paint still couldn't handle my 24-bit BMP, so I had to install Photoshop and convert the wallpaper into Win-3.1-24-bit-BMP with it. Now this Win3.1 install is 20% cooler.

@nina_kali_nina oooh https://github.com/Toyoyo/putty-win32s

@nina_kali_nina I mostly played this on Windows 95, but IIRC it wasn't included with the OS. You had to get "Plus!", which also included Hover!

@nina_kali_nina

Huh. I didn't know 95 changed the BMP format.

@nina_kali_nina At the time, Microsoft wanted people to move from 3.1 to 95, so they intentionally did not support Java on 3.1. But IBM still had OS/2 with Windows support, so IBM itself came out with a version of Java for Windows 3.x. MS was pissed. So there might be the IBM version of Java still floating out there somewhere.

@charette Editing for clarity: in 1996-97? Absolutely. But shortly after both MS and Netscape shipped browsers with JVM, so, my IE 5 has Java support, and in fact better Java support than Windows 95B had out of the box. :> But for some reason it doesn't want to accept signed jar files.

@argv_minus_one worse still, Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1 BMP aren't always compatible. And then there are OS/2 BMPs...

@nina_kali_nina why a clone of emacs when you can set up vim? According to https://www.mirrorservice.org/pub/vim/pc/README vim 7.3 was the last version to ship a win32s build. I'm not sure if you can just run the setup program or if you need to assemble an install from the binary and runtime archives

@pulkomandy I have real Emacs too, it just doesn't work. :(

@nina_kali_nina

Was it *backward* compatible, at least?

(By “backward compatible” I mean Windows 95 can read BMPs from 3.1, 3.1 can read BMPs from 3.0, etc.)

@nina_kali_nina Thank you for this. I have a netbook with FreeDos and could try to install Win 3.11.

@argv_minus_one generally, yes!

@zbrando I have to say that FreeDos is a fair deal slower than MS-DOS, unfortunately :( But it is still fun!

@nina_kali_nina it looks like there is a version of Smalltalk also: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2244

@pulkomandy Not too surprising! What's more surprising is C# can be compiled for 3.1 :)

@nina_kali_nina ok, that is cool

@nina_kali_nina I don't have anything fun or smart to say but I love this! It is definitely wrong somehow. I will try to keep up with your posts now, that background image was cool.

@nina_kali_nina If you can dig up an old enough client build it might just work. At least in IE 5

@nina_kali_nina https://www.infoworld.com/article/2170004/ibm-brings-java-to-windows-3-1.html

@charette this is nice info, thanks!

@nina_kali_nina Why say "that's not true"? I was working at IBM at the time. I was an OS/2 developer back then.

@charette that's because I misunderstood your message, sorry. At first I read "at that time" as "back in the 90s" in general, not "when java was hotness of 96-97". But that's not what you meant...

@nina_kali_nina I said it yesterday and I say it today, this is soooo coooool!!

Please never delete this installation (is it a VM? or actual hardware?)

@apposada thanks! I think this installation is meant to be a lesson and not an artifact:) so, most likely, I'll delete it one day~

@nina_kali_nina Hmmmmm...... Now I have the feeling that I really should fix my old tower...
The main board in it died, but I already had a replacement.
Exchangeable disks, at least disk sets for W98SE and DR-DOS.

@nina_kali_nina

Well, now I want a Windows 3.1 theme for KDE Plasma.

@nina_kali_nina this has been a rollercoaster of emotions

@nina_kali_nina I never used XP, but I played Space Cadet Pinball because it shipped with NT4. I’m really surprised it worked with win32s and NT but not the systems that were half way between the two.

@nina_kali_nina Oh really? I didn't have time to try it really well and compare. How do you install MS DOS and Win 3.11 on "modern" hardware without floppies?

@nina_kali_nina im not sure if i was aware that windows 3.1 programs run on xp would still have the old title bar

@nina_kali_nina @esoteric_programmer Pointers? It's not DV/X, right? Even OS/2 has an X server - PMX - which I'm using daily^Wweekly :D

@ltning @esoteric_programmer there was Desqview/X, yes, but there was also Xappeal - a commercial fork of XFree86 with no sources

@AngelaScholder why not multiple disks and multiboot? ;)

@nina_kali_nina speaking of the title bars… I vaguely remember seeing some screenshots from around two decades ago where the buttons got replaced with XP-alike ones

apparently that can be done by patching the VGA driver somehow? not entirely sure what’s going on there, but if you want to try something extra cursed… http://win31.de/etips.htm#Buttons

@nilsding the driver I'm using is open-source, so it's possible to recompile it with different icons. But icons will still be where they are but default, and it's impossible to add the "close" button without some serious kernel hacking

@argv_minus_one why Plasma when you can use all your KDE apps with progman: https://github.com/jcs/progman

@david_chisnall I suppose it works on 9x, but it wasn't a part of the standard distribution.

I also blame my mild pinball addiction on this game.

@zbrando that's a very general question :D there are many options, common would be local network, USB and CD. My weapon of choice would be installing grub on USB, using floppy emulator in it to boot into DOS, format the hard disk and install the OS, and finally bring the USB drivers to DOS - either with a custom floppy image, or by booting into a live Linux.

@kirakira the buttons in the bar were a part of a video driver in Win16 (what? yes!) so the apps running in Win32 will have default boring title bars

@kirakira and from reading this not sure you are aware, but there's no winxp here ^^ // @nina_kali_nina

@nina_kali_nina LOL! Different era. That system in the configuration it is, I guess is 25 years old. Maybe a little less.
The tower originally is from '93, initially an AMD 386DX40 with an extra large 170MB disk, via 486DX4-120 to I think it's a P166 installed now.
Disks probably between 1.2GB to 2GB.

Yep, that tower definitely has some history.
Doing the changes, install new things incl. OS certainly was a lot of fun and learning.
Also Red Hat a while in the 90s, OS/2 2.1, Warp.

@nina_kali_nina is this a cry for help

@thomholwerda thankfully everything is okay now :D I'm not planning to port Java to a weird platform _again_, not this time

@nina_kali_nina it's Win32s? oh boy, I have got to try that on ArcaOS!

@michaln it is! :)

@nina_kali_nina there is also http://frogfind.com/, wonder if it works in your extremely cursed Win31

@glebd it used to have issues for the last 6 months, last time I checked it was down. Glad that it's back, and of course it works!

@nina_kali_nina @argv_minus_one

A reference on BMP types.
Includes a version that is: vaguely specified, never seen in a wild, not created by anything, read by a single program (from the reference's author).
Yes, it's never that simple!

https://entropymine.com/jason/bmpsuite/bmpsuite/html/bmpsuite.html