VOGONS


Discover / WinGauge

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First post, by bakemono

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A recent post reminded me of this diagnostic software for Win 3.1 which I used back in the '90s. Doing a web search about it yielded very little info, eg. https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/1997 … es-hurricane-98

I have a ZIP file of it from 1999 so I decided to see if I could get it running and post some screen shots for posterity. Turns out, the ZIP file contained the contents of the installation disk, rather than a running copy, and when I ran the SETUP program it demanded a serial number. If I preserved any serial number, I don't know where it is now 22 years later. My first thought was to hack the SETUP.EXE but the lack of tools which support a 16-bit NE file makes it pretty tough. So plan B was to find a way of manually decompressing all the files. They have names like DISCWIN.EX^ and VBRUN300.DL^ but are not using a common type of file compression. They start with the bytes $00 $06, and after confirming with this handy tool: http://mark0.net/onlinetrid.html I determined that they are using the so-called 'TTComp implode' format http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/TTComp_archive

After decompressing the files I was able to run both DISCWIN and WING16 under Win3.1 and Win95. Trying to run the video benchmark froze Win95 though...

again another retro game on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/shmup-salad

Reply 2 of 2, by akula65

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An older thread on Helix Software products: Helix Software Files