Quick update.

Found an interesting page about the history of emulation..:
https://emulation.miraheze.org/wiki/History_of_emulation

Edit: And some document (ca. year 99 of 20th century).

Okay, this is probably olds new, but..

SIDPLAY, the MOS SID emulator intended for C64 music, also had a Win16 version.
- A video of it running on OTVDM can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axlwvRDv0U4

Screenshot attached..

Quick update..

I found something also interesting that's no emulator, but useful for emulation.
- It's "Amyxfer", a transfer program for ADF files that runs on 16-Bit Windows and uses the COM ports.

Screenshots attached.

PS: I've choosen this background picture for obvious reasons.. 😉
Credits - BG pix: http://www.sabrinaonline2k.net/MHA/fanart1.html

There might be some old Win3.1 standalone arcade emulators at http://caesar.logiqx.com - there's a hell of a lot of DOS ones...

Update.

Found a Super NES emulator for Win95&Win32s.
Needs more testing..

Screenshot attached.

Edit: Some more testing. Used my own carts..

Stiletto wrote on 2020-08-20, 01:38:

There might be some old Win3.1 standalone arcade emulators at http://caesar.logiqx.com - there's a hell of a lot of DOS ones...

Wow, thanks a lot for the tip! I'll have a look at this site! 😁

Looks like it's trying to use hi/true color and being downconverted?

jmarsh wrote on 2020-08-20, 01:53:

Looks like it's trying to use hi/true color and being downconverted?

Well, yes. It has to do with colour depths. The program uses WinG and draws an error message about colour depth (wants 16c or 256c).
Since the Super NES has a very high colour dept (over 4096c or so if layers are combined), the emulator likely uses all 256c available.
Because of this, I assume, the "static colours" (20) that are reserved for Windows GDI (?) are used up, as well.
If the program uses 235 / 236 colours or less, the desktop should be left in intact. So far goes the theory. What really happens.. I don't know. 😅
https://www.drdobbs.com/windows/implementing- … ndows/184409700

Edit: Also interesting.. The different palettes of each OS or platform..:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_palettes

Quick update.

Found a copy of a beta version of Hyper Boy, a Gameboy emulator.
The game's binary seems to excecute on Windows 3.1+Win32s, but something vital seems missing.
On Windows XP, it "works", but causes a high CPU usage (78%). Maybe needs compatibility mode.
Tested on real hardware.

Screenshots and photo attached.

Update.

Found another emulator, Win64. It emulates a C64..
Program seems to run perfectly fine on Windows 3.1+Win32s, but there's no video output..
This makes me wonder if some popular GDI features are generally missing in Win32s or the Win3.1 GDI.
Tested on real hardware.

Screenshot attached.

Quick update.

Found an interesting thread over there at our friends from vcfed forums.. 😀

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?494 … -Inboard-386-pc

Quick update.

Discovered something interesting that runs on Windows 3.1: Lunar Magic 1.x, a level editor for SMW on Super NES..

Screenshot attached.
Source: https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=95320&page=1

Edit: The complete set of Lunar Magic can be found at:
https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=section&a=details&id=22116

Quick Update (again)..

I'm currently checking if it's possible to load some flavour of ddraw.dll inside of Win32s.
There will be of course no acceleration due to the lack of drivers, but maybe it will paint graphics by falling back to GDI.
Anyway, this takes some time. I'll need to check the SDKs, the DirectX redistributables and the files that come with Windows 95 and old NT releases.
Maybe some files from ReactOS, Wine or the modern DiretDraw wrappers could also be used, not sure.
Anyway, these likely need to be compiled with relocation tables, which requires older compilers.

Edit: (Multi-) Threading might also be an issue.
Win95 was full of it, despite not being able to use it in an intelligent way. 😉

Quick Update.

Not really an emulator, but the software for the Sega Dev Card runs on Windows 3.1x. Partly, at least.
An overview video (not by me) can be seen here: link.

More information:
https://www.retroreversing.com/sega-mega-driv … evelopment-kit/
https://www.obscuregamers.com/threads/lost-se … seen-these.823/

I'm currently reading the book "Porting to Win32" to get a better understanding of Win32s and Windows mechanics.

I'll do tests with Windows NT 3.1 in Virtual PC 2007 soon.
Just finished patching and installation.
Stay tooned.

Quick Update.

Found an interesting article that cover DirectDraw 1.0 and WinG:
https://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article608.asp

Edit: And here's one about Win32s:
https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/win31x.htm

I use Microsoft Visual C++ version 4.0 (available on... well Google) when I want to do some C code that uses Win32 and targets Win32S.

It's the last version that supports it. Any new project will be compatible with Win32S out of the box.

It runs perfectly on Windows 10, but of course it's so old it's really hard to use for us modern developers.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-08-24, 08:44:

I use Microsoft Visual C++ version 4.0 (available on... well Google) when I want to do some C code that uses Win32 and targets Win32S.

It's the last version that supports it. Any new project will be compatible with Win32S out of the box.

It runs perfectly on Windows 10, but of course it's so old it's really hard to use for us modern developers.

Hi! Thanks for the tip! So far, I've only used Borland Delphi 2.0 to compile Win32s compatible applications..
By coincidence, I found an old Amiga emulator that was compiled with Visual C++ 4.10.
Perhaps there's a small chance getting it to work on Win32s, too.

I've also checked some programs on Windows NT 3.1 in the mean time.
The result was rather dissappointing. Win NT 3.1 is very limited by todays standard.
In fact, it can't even run the most basic Win32 applications that instantly execute on Windows 3.1+Win32s.

Not even "Lie about Win32" (win32lie) does run on Windows NT 3.1.
It's related to the Windows API and the PE header. Programs expect to find at least Version 3.50 or 4.0.

The 16-Bit counter part (lieversn) runs, but isn't of much help.
Only very old Windows 3.x programs use the 3.95 version number to detect Win95.

To make matters worse, the execution is very, very slow. At least in Virtual PC 2007 on a Pentium III based laptop.
At least for 16-Bit programs. A Windows 2.x image viewer, easel, from the 1980s takes minutes to load a GIF image,
while Windows 2.03 and Windows 3.1 need about 10-20 seconds on a 286-10.

Quick update.

I've tested vMac and some other emulators on Windows NT 3.1.
The result wasn't very good. Many programs wouldn't load.

Windows NT 3.1 apparently is too old to load newer PE files ("unexpected error 11").
The only workaround is to manually patch each of the EXE files' header.

Quick Update.

Found a neat site that covers the different Visual C++ releases..:
http://www.malsmith.net/blog/visual-c-visual-history/