There was Win3emu last year but I don't know what became of it since.

http://www.win3mu.com/

Win3emu looks so promising, but the page looks unchanged from when it was introduced.

twiz11 wrote:

I know of Wine for Linux, but for Windows, is there anyway to run 16 bit applications?

WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator.

WINE is a compatibility layer which translates API calls in real time.

Win3mu appears to be something of a hybrid between an actual emulator (for example, Win3.1 running in DOSBox), and something like WINE.
The website says it emulates a 286, but also translates API calls to modern Windows so who knows how you'd classify it really 😕

The developer said that only simpler games are currently supported (no current support for WinG or such libraries) but that is still something to achieve since a considerable number of Win3.x games rely on them.

I've been working on getting Wine to run with an x86 emulator written in C and using SDL.

Here is a page that has some game demos that run with the Emscripten/Javascript build. I also have a Windows build.

http://boxedwine.sourceforge.net/b4/games.html

It's still a long ways off from any kind of beta status, but it runs about 50% of Win16 stuff I throw at it and some 32-bit stuff. I use Quake 2 when bench testing it. Currently I'm working on a dynamic recompiler for the Windows build to speed it up.

danoon wrote:

I've been working on getting Wine to run with an x86 emulator written in C and using SDL. […]
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I've been working on getting Wine to run with an x86 emulator written in C and using SDL.

Here is a page that has some game demos that run with the Emscripten/Javascript build. I also have a Windows build.

http://boxedwine.sourceforge.net/b4/games.html

It's still a long ways off from any kind of beta status, but it runs about 50% of Win16 stuff I throw at it and some 32-bit stuff. I use Quake 2 when bench testing it. Currently I'm working on a dynamic recompiler for the Windows build to speed it up.

This looks promising as well. Have you had a chance to test WinG software on it? Does it work like Win3mu (like launching the application directly from Host OS)?

Currently it is strictly c/sdl, so I haven't done anything to hook up to the Windows shell. It probably wouldn't be too hard to figure out the registry entries to hook up a "run with" boxed entry so that you can right click on an old Win16 app to run it. Or you can just create your own .bat files to run BoxedWine since it is a command line program for now.

As for WinG, BoxedWine's goals is to run everything that Wine can run. I have tested BoxedWine with SimTower which uses WinG and it runs file with the Widows build of BoxedWine. Currently the Emscripten build can't run it because SimTower requires that setjmp/long jump in my code work and to do that I would have to enable it in Emscripten which slows things down about 50%. There is hope for zero cost exceptions in the future with WASM, but its not ready yet.

Have you given up on jDosbox?

danoon wrote:

Currently it is strictly c/sdl, so I haven't done anything to hook up to the Windows shell. It probably wouldn't be too hard to figure out the registry entries to hook up a "run with" boxed entry so that you can right click on an old Win16 app to run it. Or you can just create your own .bat files to run BoxedWine since it is a command line program for now.

As for WinG, BoxedWine's goals is to run everything that Wine can run. I have tested BoxedWine with SimTower which uses WinG and it runs file with the Widows build of BoxedWine. Currently the Emscripten build can't run it because SimTower requires that setjmp/long jump in my code work and to do that I would have to enable it in Emscripten which slows things down about 50%. There is hope for zero cost exceptions in the future with WASM, but its not ready yet.

Interesting. I'm holding on to upgrade to x64 until there's something that runs win16 directly, so I think it's time now. Can't wait to fire Nitemare 3D on it!

filipetolhuizen: I had good luck running SimTower in Dosbox with a copy of Windows 3.1. One of the goals BoxedWine is to be able to do that without an official copy of Windows 3.1. I started working on my own implementation of the Windows API, starting with Win32. I got Age of Empire and Caesar 3 working in jDosbox without Wine or Windows. But I realized that approach was more than 1 person could do. It was easier to implement about 100 or so Linux kernel commands (syscalls) and run an unmodified version of Wine.

collector: Yeah, I haven't worked on jDosbox in years. After Oracle let go of Java in the browser, jDosbox didn't seem as useful anymore. It was fun to work on and I was happy that it could boot Windows XP. But there were some serious limitations about what it could do with a dynamic recompiler.

danoon wrote:

filipetolhuizen: I had good luck running SimTower in Dosbox with a copy of Windows 3.1. One of the goals BoxedWine is to be able to do that without an official copy of Windows 3.1. I started working on my own implementation of the Windows API, starting with Win32. I got Age of Empire and Caesar 3 working in jDosbox without Wine or Windows. But I realized that approach was more than 1 person could do. It was easier to implement about 100 or so Linux kernel commands (syscalls) and run an unmodified version of Wine.

collector: Yeah, I haven't worked on jDosbox in years. After Oracle let go of Java in the browser, jDosbox didn't seem as useful anymore. It was fun to work on and I was happy that it could boot Windows XP. But there were some serious limitations about what it could do with a dynamic recompiler.

jdosbox could run XP? I didn't know that. how well did it run?

Also, I tried boxedwine (locally on my PC, not in browser) and the game it came with ran too fast.

retrogamerguy: It didn't run Windows XP very well, but I could launch IE and Pinball. But often it would run the JavaVM out of memory because I didn't know how to unallocate the byte code I generated for the dynamic recompiler.

As for Chomp running too fast, I guess that's a good problem to have. When I first got it to run I didn't have that problem, but now BoxedWine is a lot faster. I should find a new small default game to give with the download as an example. Any suggestions for a good classic small game for Windows 3.1 that is free or at least has a demo?

danoon wrote:

Any suggestions for a good classic small game for Windows 3.1 that is free or at least has a demo?

Hi, you'll find quite a lot at archive.org's software library. 😀
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_win3_games

Some small games I know of: Re: Any good Windows 3.1 games?
Jiji (JRPG) may not fully work, though, as it plays music via the PC-Speaker.
Same for Warpath! It sends OPL2 commands to port 388/389h. WINE doesn't support that so far.

There are also some very small Windows games at the GUI Gallery site.
But unless fixed, WINE likely can't run native games for Windows 1.x/2.x anymore.
Wine on newer windows OSes?

danoon wrote:

retrogamerguy: It didn't run Windows XP very well, but I could launch IE and Pinball. But often it would run the JavaVM out of memory because I didn't know how to unallocate the byte code I generated for the dynamic recompiler.

As for Chomp running too fast, I guess that's a good problem to have. When I first got it to run I didn't have that problem, but now BoxedWine is a lot faster. I should find a new small default game to give with the download as an example. Any suggestions for a good classic small game for Windows 3.1 that is free or at least has a demo?

Nitemare 3D is not considered small for its time but has a demo. David P. Gray's site used to have it, but now it's not that easily found anymore.

Jo22 wrote:

Hi, you'll find quite a lot at archive.org's software library. 😀

Gotta be careful with what is there. There is a lot more than just old shareware/demos. There is a lot of warez releases there as well.

danoon wrote:

retrogamerguy: It didn't run Windows XP very well, but I could launch IE and Pinball. But often it would run the JavaVM out of memory because I didn't know how to unallocate the byte code I generated for the dynamic recompiler.

well pinball is the only reason why anybody would want XP this day and age so that's good enough.

danoon wrote:

As for Chomp running too fast, I guess that's a good problem to have. When I first got it to run I didn't have that problem, but now BoxedWine is a lot faster. I should find a new small default game to give with the download as an example. Any suggestions for a good classic small game for Windows 3.1 that is free or at least has a demo?

isn't boxedwine supposed to come with a x86 emulator, wouldn't be possible to slow down the emulated CPU?

Wait, are you talking about that universally beloved space cadet thing (the monkey island of pinball games, so to say) ?
In case you do, it also works on good ol' Windows 3.1 via Win32s. 😀
http://gunkies.org/wiki/File:Windows_NT_4.0_p … g_on_Win32s.jpg

Jo22 wrote:

Wait, are you talking about that universally beloved space cadet thing (the monkey island of pinball games, so to say) ?
In case you do, it also works on good ol' Windows 3.1 via Win32s. 😀
http://gunkies.org/wiki/File:Windows_NT_4.0_p … g_on_Win32s.jpg

True, it would run on that.