First post, by ec5778
Hello
I've been trying very hard to get a very old Dorling Kindersley title working. It's called P.B. Bear's Birthday Party although there is a series of similar titles and it's likely that they all use similar technology and will be equally difficult to get working. Was published in 1995 for Windows 3.1 and also works on Windows 95 as far as I recall.
A few pointers and information on what I've tried. I have Windows 10 and Ubuntu 17.10 available to me.
1. Although it's not Windows - Wine. Installs beautifully in a 32-bit wine environment (even on a 64-bit host OS) but couldn't get it to work and have filed a bug report.
2. Windows 10. No chance because 64-bit versions of Windows don't support 16-bit Windows applications.
3. Dosbox + Windows 3.1/3.11. In theory this should work but fails to install
4. Windows Vista/7 [presumably it would have to be 32-bit]. Tried briefly under a Windows 7 virtual machine and failed, but that was before I found out about the patch mentioned below. (Nevertheless, according to the publishers of the patch it is only for XP and doesn't work under Windows 7).
5. Windows XP (32-bit, inside Oracle VirtualBox VM). Works with a patch
6. Windows 95/98/ME - I'd guess it would work but haven't tried.
Hope this saves someone the time I've spent figuring all this out.