I would think that it would have at least some of the same stability problems 9x and since you would have to boot it, no access to the host's file system, including the DC drive. And again, one of my main interests is for my installers. The installer for ReactOS is around 50 MB and without installing it I can't say how big an image it would make. 50+ MB is quite a bit to tack on top of an installer. Also, it would be a tall order to inject the game's files or an ISO of the CD into the ReactOS image from an installer. For my own use there are several things I can do, but doing it on the user's end via an installer on top of copy right issues becomes another matter.

The issue of running Win16 games without a copy of Win3.1 has incited some discussion at RGB Classic Games Forum, and it occurred to me that compatibility issues could be solved if Win16 games were backported to DOS (provided that source code is available). However, I have absolutely no idea if this is at all possible, and I'd much appreciate if the tech savvy guys here could provide an answer.

There's one open source Win16 game that I know of, Blades of Exile, however there have been no attempts to the best of my knowledge to port it to DOS.

On the other hand, if a Win16 game was open source, I guess it would be less problematic to port it to modern Windows, MacOS or Linux directly rather than bother creating a DOS port, but still it would be nice to know if this is actually possible (there are, after all, games that had been released both on DOS and Windows in the 90s).

It would depend entirely on how the game was programmed. Obviously something that made heavy use of Windows resources would need to be substantially re-written before it could run in DOS. Certainly, everything would need some sort of graphics or sound driver, and if you were going to write some component that could be casually dropped-in to the source code of any Windows game, you'd practically be re-writing portions of Windows.

MrFlibble wrote:

(there are, after all, games that had been released both on DOS and Windows in the 90s).

I can't think of very many of them, aside from SimCity and SimCity 2000. And in such cases the Windows port was clearly substantially different from the DOS port.

Sierra did this for a couple of their SCI games.The first versions of KQ7 included no DOS version, but by v2, they added a DOS interpreter. For Phantasmagoria they not only has a later release with a DOS interpreter, but had a patch to add DOS support to earlier releases. In fact, my Phantasmagoria installer will convert a Win only copy to DOS for DOSBox play.

The problem is after the fact fan made conversions without the source. Even the SCI games are a problem as it is usually not possible to swap out interpreters between games, even when they were of the same interpreter versions. Additionally, there were often differences between resources. The KQ7 Win interpreter used standard Windows AVI files for cutscenes. The DOS used RBT (robot) format for the cutscenes. KQ6 DOS used SEQ and the Win used AVI.

You would almost need to RE a new interpreter, which as you say, you might as well just port to modern Windows. This has the same problem as ScummVM in that support would have to be done one by one in a painfully slow laborious process. I would suppose that ScummVM at least has the benefit of an established backend. Even with the backend, the effort required is why I think adding DOS games to ScummVM that work perfectly in DOSBox is a bit of a waste of time, especially when the end result is often not as good as that with DOSBox.

I really don't see anyone wasting time converting Windows 16bit games to DOS when you can just grab a copy of Windows 3.x and install it easily in Dosbox. Yes, the legal copy of Windows 3.x is not THAT easy of an hurdle. But easier that converting Windows games to dos...

Jorpho wrote:

MrFlibble wrote:

(there are, after all, games that had been released both on DOS and Windows in the 90s).

I can't think of very many of them, aside from SimCity and SimCity 2000. And in such cases the Windows port was clearly substantially different from the DOS port.

Heroes of Might and Magic and Heroes of Might and Magic II have both DOS and Windows versions, and there are virtually no substantial differences between the platforms. Warcraft II was ported to Windows with the Battle.net Edition, with some tweaks but essentially this is the same game.

Dominus wrote:

I really don't see anyone wasting time converting Windows 16bit games to DOS when you can just grab a copy of Windows 3.x and install it easily in Dosbox. Yes, the legal copy of Windows 3.x is not THAT easy of an hurdle. But easier that converting Windows games to dos...

What I would like to have is a way of running legacy software on modern systems that would be freely available to all, as it is with DOSBox for DOS software. Neither obtaining a pirated copy of Win3.1 nor paying circa $50 or more for a legit one on eBay actually helps make this happen.

Well Windows 3.x is freely available to all on the internets. It's just not legal.

I remember back in the day there were demos of MS software that used a stripped down copy of Windows 3.x to just execute the software. It may be possible to get away with that but I'm not sure.

The Win9x setup uses the same stripped down 3.x

http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=374

It's doubtful MS would come knocking if a stripped down version was used but you never know....and VOGONS of course would not support this.

You could probably uploaded the packaged win16 games with stripped down 3.x on archive.org since it seems like no one cares about copyrighted content on their servers.

Thanks for pointing this out. It's worth exploring. There still is the problem of the 16-bit games that strongly prefer 9x over 3x.

Was searching GOG via google and found this old thread:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/how_long_bef … es_winbox/page1

DosFreak wrote:

Well Windows 3.x is freely available to all on the internets. It's just not legal.

Yeah but this is not what I meant when I said "freely available to all, as it is with DOSBox for DOS software". It's obvious that every piece of software can be pirated, however this has absolutely nothing to do with the free & open source software ideal that DOSBox for example is developed in accord with.

DOS is not much more than a kernel. I'm not a developer, but I imagine 90%+ of what the DOSBox devs work on is not DOS related per se, but emulating the x86 PC & associated gaming peripherals properly. Windows 9x on the other hand is hundreds if not thousands of files painstakingly created by a large team of developers at Microsoft with total access to the source code. I don't think you are going to easily get an open-source version of that for running Win9x games. Time would be better spent working on an accurate PC emulator and throwing an old copy of Windows 98 on top of it.

If Microsoft would release the source code to their old VirtualPC program, that would be a great place to start.

valnar wrote:

If Microsoft would release the source code to their old VirtualPC program, that would be a great place to start.

Why? VirtualPC also requires a separate copy of Windows. And as far as open-source virtual machines go, we already have VirtualBox, which is entirely capable of running different versions of Windows. (For that matter, there's also QEMU and Bochs.)

EDIT:

collector wrote:

Sierra did this for a couple of their SCI games.The first versions of KQ7 included no DOS version, but by v2, they added a DOS interpreter. For Phantasmagoria they not only has a later release with a DOS interpreter, but had a patch to add DOS support to earlier releases. In fact, my Phantasmagoria installer will convert a Win only copy to DOS for DOSBox play.

Turns out this was a unique property of the compiler available at the time.
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=1104

Jorpho wrote:

valnar wrote:

If Microsoft would release the source code to their old VirtualPC program, that would be a great place to start.

Why? VirtualPC also requires a separate copy of Windows. And as far as open-source virtual machines go, we already have VirtualBox, which is entirely capable of running different versions of Windows. (For that matter, there's also QEMU and Bochs.)

Not to mention the fact that MS VPC only emulates an S3 compatible 2D video card (at least the PPC Mac versions do) so you won't be playing any game that requires hardware 3D acceleration.