keenmaster486 wrote:

How hard is it, really, to compile newer browsers for old systems if you use the right compiler flags?

You would’ve to ask that question to Roytam1 on MSFN forums. But I presume you need to at least compile the source against a compatible Visual C++ version for the older OS, as well as port the APIs from the newer OS back in with the kernel extender plugins.

Sorry for overposting, but... I think that my post is relevant to the subject:

Re: List of Web Browsers For All Operating Systems

If only we could port these browsers to Windows 98, it would require a massive overhaul of KernelEx. KernelEx seems to be relatively abandoned these days and completely messed up.

I think it was inevitable that the web would evolve to a point where it would be impractical for everyday use on 9x systems. Even archive.org, where we could get old contents like audio, videos, pictures,and snapshots of websites, cannot render properly on KernelEx-enabled browsers or third-party browsers such as Retrozilla (which, ironically, is how I am posting this).

In my case, the only way to watch a youtube video on a 9x system is to download a video using an online video downloader, save it as either .3pg or .mp4 and play it on Classic Media Player. Trying to play videos on a non-youtube site (dailymotion, etc) may be a bit challenging.

I remember around this time, 10 years ago, parts of the web was still viewable on 9x; youtube was still powered by flash, AIM was still around and used by lots of people, KernelEx was still in the developing stages, etc. What I hope to see in the future is a way to emulate the web as it was in the past, similar to the web.archive proxy, but on a grand scale, streaming videos at low quality using an old version of VLC, and a chat system in the likes of Discord. I don't know, I'm probably just fantasizing at this point.

You can try to use www.invidio.us, which is a mirror for Youtube. I dunno if it is compatible for older browsers but it's supposed to be.

Well, here we go... I am enjoying what is perhaps the last little bit of time during which I can read, write and send posts on VOGONS using retro web browsers. Right now I am using Links 2, as it is the one which runs best and can load all the HTTPS sites on my Thinkpad 560.

Now, I don't know whether or not we will get a retro-compatible VOGONS at all in the future. For all I know, the new forum software will load OK on old browsers. I hope it does. But it is honestly doubtful as compatibility is not really a prime concern these days. It's OK though, as we will continue to find ways to make our vintage computers more connective and useful in the modern day.

And here I am making another post using Internet Explorer 3.0.

It's fascinating just how well this browser works loading modern websites.

Of course it can't do any HTTPS sites, but loading Google works just fine, and I can search for things.

VOGONS stylesheets are totally borked. But that's OK; the functionality is still there - I can read, write, and make posts. Windows 3.1 can still be useful!

hahah i hope vogons never changes

I think... I have a dream where DOSBox’s NE2000 patch gets updated to run with wifi instead of ethernet. And another dream, where the older iOS version of dosbox by litchie gets updated to do the same. Then I could use internet from my iPad or macbook pro within dosbox whenever I am. Currently, the mac version requires ethernet cable in, and the iOS version requires some ridiculous setup, where I have to run a script on another machine, that will provide internet access to it (like a fake ISP) and winsock has to be installed on my dosboxs win3.1 for it. It’s painful.

bfcastello wrote on 2019-12-11, 22:12:

keenmaster486 wrote:

How hard is it, really, to compile newer browsers for old systems if you use the right compiler flags?

You would’ve to ask that question to Roytam1 on MSFN forums. But I presume you need to at least compile the source against a compatible Visual C++ version for the older OS, as well as port the APIs from the newer OS back in with the kernel extender plugins.

Oh boy, even ~10 years ago it was really hard to compile Firefox for Win32!
If memory serves, the Mozilla people had to use Windows 2000 (x86/32-Bit) with special boot loader flags.
- Because they were running out of memory on the development system otherwise (using x64 Windows wasn't possible)!

keenmaster486 wrote on 2019-12-16, 06:06:

Well, here we go... I am enjoying what is perhaps the last little bit of time during which I can read, write and send posts on VOGONS using retro web browsers. Right now I am using Links 2, as it is the one which runs best and can load all the HTTPS sites on my Thinkpad 560.

Well, you could still run an older version Virtualbox/Virtual PC on Win98SE and use a VM with NIC pass-through and proper TCP/IP and HTTPS support. 😁
Seriously, let's Win9x die in peace. It's network stack and resources (KERNAE, GDI etc) are somewhat limited compared to the bloated WWW of today.

It's like fixing a mouldered, sinking boat on the wide ocean by sticking worn towels, pants and socks in the holes of its wooden boat hull. 😉
On a calm little river or a pond (intranet), performing such action might be fun, even. But it's the internet. Or more precisely, the web.
The #1 one place of never ending changes, inconsistency and transience.. 🙁

About the only thing reasonable that comes to mind, I believe, would be a portal or special frontend for the Wayback Machine.
That's were old versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mosaic etc would come in handy and would shine (along with their plugins for Flash, Realplayer, Quicktime etc).
Especially, when modern browser are starting to "forget" about Quirks Mode and pre-HTML5 technology.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-01-07, 18:10:

But it's the internet. Or more precisely, the web.
The #1 one place of never ending changes, inconsistency and transience.. 🙁

Jo22 wrote on 2020-01-07, 18:10:

Especially, when modern browser are starting to "forget" about Quirks Mode and pre-HTML5 technology.

I don't think Internet works like that. Sometimes, from time to time, developers tend to reuse or bring back old stuff. For example, around 2017 some news websites brought back the text mode (low bandwidth web browsing) like CNN did, during a hurricane somewhere in US. CNN still keeps it online. Text mode was great for our retro old browsers. Bootstrap is ditching jQuery to use vanilla JavaScript again. Some very simple CSS tricks can do the same stuff jQuery does (like modals, carousel, collapse tabs, sliding menus) and these tricks can even work in older browsers. I can't wait to try them out in some new projects that I can start from zero, but at work I cannot do that, because we have to use a CMS that is bloated with jQuery, YUI libraries and stuff like this.

Even a PHPBB forum can work without or very little JavaScript. Although with IE 5.01, and neither Opera 3.62 or Netscape 4.08 I cannot log in here, while in the previous forum version I could even post here in any of the three browsers...

Not every developer will consider doing "graceful degradation" to their projects (I always consider) but OK, we know flexbox, css grid and other s**t from CSS3 will not work in older browsers, but we can gracefully degrade them so our websites can work anywhere, everywhere. I tend to avoid and use very little from CSS3 exactly because of this, and I prefer to use them only when the situation requires. Nowadays most people want us to throw these CSS eyecandy into their websites just because "it looks great!". That's a classic case of form over function.

Most developers are lazy and prefer to throw a lot of frameworks and libraries into their projects just to finish them quickly. With 15+ years of experience in my career, I prefer not to work with these developers, every detail of my work is thought and carefully designed & crafted, every place I worked for has high praise for the quality of my work.

When developers start dropping their favorite libraries/frameworks to do some real development, and care for some retro compatibility, then the day where we will not worry about the need to download the latest version of any browser to view their work will come soon.

I have some very good words for Microsofts excellent retro compatibility of their applications, I mean, its 2020, and even some 16-bit apps made by them 30 years ago still work on Windows 10. About Apple not so much, they simply don't care (they never cared anyway, if you remember the rosetta fiasco when they switched from PowerPC to Intel).

So for me the problem isn't the age of the browsers, it's the developers.

bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-07, 19:31:

.
I have some very good words for Microsofts excellent retro compatibility of their applications, I mean, its 2020, and even some 16-bit apps made by them 30 years ago still work on Windows 10. .

Just the 32-bit version you mean? Tried running a 16-bit program on this thing and no go Joe.

bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-07, 19:31:

I have some very good words for Microsofts excellent retro compatibility of their applications, I mean, its 2020, and even some 16-bit apps made by them 30 years ago still work on Windows 10.

Well, yes, but support is kinda medicore, at best. Also, application compatibility in itself is the main reason for Windows to still exist. 😉
As for DOS/Win16, they had the SoftPC emulation core since the 90s, but didn't even bother to make it work with the x86-64 releases of Windows 2000/Windows XP:
Instead, they claimed removal of 16-Bit compatibility was unavoidable and necessary due to the missing of V86 in Long Mode..
Which was just a lame excuse., IMHO. Pure 16-bit Protected Mode code, as used by Windows 3.1/Windows 3.1 apps in Standard-Mode, was/is perfectly legal in Long Mode.
In a similar fashion to Concurrent DOS -which supported multitasking of DOS applications on a 286-, it surely would have been possible
to make a modified Win16 sub system run natively on x86-64. Remember, DOS in NTVDM always had been synthetic, too, so is adaptable by design.
Anyway, even the possibility of emulation was ignored/discarded at the time when it was clear that x86-64 was the way to go.

Users who asked for Win16 support on Windows x64 were often told (by other users, btw) that emulation would be too slow to be useful.
Apparently, these users never ran a RISC flavour of Windows NT or grew up with hardware emulators only (game consoles etc). 😁
That a "slow" performance (-Win3 apps ran on 286 onwards-) would actually be a good thing to get old, timing-sensitive applications to run, apparently only realized a minority of users.
To this very day, users begging for 16-Bit/Legacy support aren't seldom being threaded like fools (described as people who live in the past). 🙁

Newest thing that comes to mind is Windows 10 for ARM. People who're seriously interested in better Win32/Win64 support were/are being offended.
Even though they often only want to run useful GUI applications, that rely on simple API calls rather than heavy x86 calculations (say IrfanView or WinAmp).
(They were not offended by Microsoft, of course. But by other users/fans of ARM platform that believe in a future world without x86.)

PS: Aero Glass/Desktop Window Manager in Vista/7 unintentionally fixed some old Win16 GDI bugs. 😀
So it perhaps makes sense switching on Aero. On Windows 8/10, there's Glass8 and similar programs.

Edit: Small edit.
Edit: Regarding Win16/DOS applications on Windows x64.. It was solved by now. By users.
Thanks to some modified NTVDM and a special port of Wine (otvdm/winevdm). 😀

bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-07, 19:31:

About Apple not so much, they simply don't care (they never cared anyway, if you remember the rosetta fiasco when they switched from PowerPC to Intel).

Well, yes, I think the same in some way or another. On the other hand, someone could says they "learned" from the past.
Mac OS 9, which was decleared "dead" in 2002, was able to execute 68k Mac OS applications from as early as 1984.
Sure, that was perhaps unintentionally because the OS relied on some core system functions that still were made of Motorola 68000 code that had to go trough a built-in emulator.
Last, but not least, the "Classic Environment" (a VM) was supported on all Power PCs running Tiger, including the G5 line, which was unable to natively boot OS 9.
This made it possible to run 68k applications out-of-box up to at least 2007 (last Tiger update, 10.4.11 was released in November of that year).

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-01-07, 20:40:

bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-07, 19:31:

.
I have some very good words for Microsofts excellent retro compatibility of their applications, I mean, its 2020, and even some 16-bit apps made by them 30 years ago still work on Windows 10. .

Just the 32-bit version you mean? Tried running a 16-bit program on this thing and no go Joe.

I installed OTVDM (not NTVDM, which is exclusive to 32 bit Windows) and they work. I was able to play SkiFree natively

Edit: forgot to mention that when I wrote this, I was thinking about the WinFile and Progman, the first one was released on their github with a few tweaks to be able to run on Win 10.

https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

Progman, as well as some apps with the support of OTVDM, was made available by users - the post above was correct, I was wrong.

bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-07, 21:45:

I installed OTVDM (not NTVDM, which is exclusive to 32 bit Windows) and they work. I was able to play SkiFree natively

The latest version is called WINEVDM.
https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

otya128 even tries to redirect you on the OTVDM Github: https://github.com/otya128/OTVDM -> https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

Stiletto wrote on 2020-01-08, 04:45:

The latest version is called WINEVDM. https://github.com/otya128/winevdm […]
Show full quote

bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-07, 21:45:

I installed OTVDM (not NTVDM, which is exclusive to 32 bit Windows) and they work. I was able to play SkiFree natively

The latest version is called WINEVDM.
https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

otya128 even tries to redirect you on the OTVDM Github: https://github.com/otya128/OTVDM -> https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

Yeah! That one!

Winevdm also allowed me to play the classic 16 bit Solitaire instead of the mess that is in microsoft store. Man, they’ve lost the way with Windows after XP...

Anyone managed to get SSH2DOS working in any VM instance? Mine is MSDOS622 + WFW311, and I installed everything required for internet to be working on Windows, which is working fine. But on MSDOS I can't get it working, not even installing MSCLIENT 3.0 which throws me errors on boot.

EDIT: I can connect to the NAS here at my work without any effort on Windows For Workgroups 3.11, but I couldn't connect to a shared folder on my MacBook Pro, even if I set it to work for both SMB and AFP. I don't know how the NAS is set up, though.

SSH2DOS no longer works with modern SSH, sadly.

You need SMB1 support in host/server for dos/win3.11 client to be able to connect. Can Mac do that? (I'm not a mac user)

keenmaster486 wrote on 2020-01-08, 22:10:

SSH2DOS no longer works with modern SSH, sadly.

Dammit 🙁

GigAHerZ wrote on 2020-01-08, 22:29:

You need SMB1 support in host/server for dos/win3.11 client to be able to connect. Can Mac do that? (I'm not a mac user)

I will take a look on it after the dinner here... probably not.

Apparently there are some users reporting that they could connect to SMB1 shares with macOS Mojave, and since they upgraded to Catalina (like me), they are using SMB3 and they cannot connect anymore to their old shares or old devices that are still using SMB1. But apparently I can sort of reenable it, maybe, let's see...

Edit 2: I forgot the VM in a USB external hard drive at work. I'll have to wait till tomorrow. Damnit

bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-08, 22:52:

Dammit :( […]
Show full quote

keenmaster486 wrote on 2020-01-08, 22:10:

SSH2DOS no longer works with modern SSH, sadly.

Dammit 🙁

GigAHerZ wrote on 2020-01-08, 22:29:

You need SMB1 support in host/server for dos/win3.11 client to be able to connect. Can Mac do that? (I'm not a mac user)

I will take a look on it after the dinner here... probably not.

Apparently there are some users reporting that they could connect to SMB1 shares with macOS Mojave, and since they upgraded to Catalina (like me), they are using SMB3 and they cannot connect anymore to their old shares or old devices that are still using SMB1. But apparently I can sort of reenable it, maybe, let's see...

Edit 2: I forgot the VM in a USB external hard drive at work. I'll have to wait till tomorrow. Damnit

Thanks for checking out! 😀

GigAHerZ wrote on 2020-01-08, 22:29:

You need SMB1 support in host/server for dos/win3.11 client to be able to connect. Can Mac do that? (I'm not a mac user)

I do not know either. I've got a few Macs and Win 3.x machines for testing, but these are all hopelessly outdated. 🙁
In either case, an old/spare Raspberry Pi could act as a "bridge" between generations. SMB/Samba and other stuff on *nix is highly customizable.
Alternatively, a Virtual Machine can help (w/ WfW, OS/2 or Win9x). Just run it on your host/server and let it access a shared folder folder (by the use of VM additions).
That way, you gain native SMB1 compatibility in your network without additional hardware.
In fact, here you can fine tune your settings, even. A VM can be throttled, for example. Or in Win3.x/9,x, WQHLT can reduce CPU usage.

Edit: Small edits.