leileilol wrote on 2025-05-24, 23:19:

or any of those "welcome" 3d games

I talked about the "TC Games" with him on stream, unfortunately at the time he was testing Windows 3.0 compatibility and the TC games are for 3.1, and I also just learned that apparently all those 3D graphics it does is just through GDI itself, no WinG.

There are some I don't actually have the shareware copies of, like the Spy Hunter clone for example. I only have "Asteroids", "Bout", "Car War", "Defender", "Space Invaders", "Joust", "Ping Pong", "Star Fighter", "Skirmish", "Star Trek", "Sword Play", "Trek War," and "Virtual World".

All of these I pulled off Disc 2 of "The Complete Encyclopedia of Games on 2 CDs!" by "Microforum Publishing".

486!

MrFlibble wrote on 2025-05-24, 16:26:

I've long been involved with the RGB Classic Games community, whose members taught me the value of original clean ZIP files. I f […]
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I've long been involved with the RGB Classic Games community, whose members taught me the value of original clean ZIP files. I found that simply removing the appended ZIP comment (for example, using Info-ZIP's z command) may restore the original form of the file -- provided that the comment was added, and not created with a completely repackaged archive.

The same goes for injected FILE_ID.DIZ files, deleting them with the DOS version of Info-ZIP may revert the ZIP to its original state, byte-by-byte identical to what you could get from the devs/pubs/distributors.

I can give a few more insights on the matter of ZIP originality if you're interested. First off, the whole process of establishing if a ZIP is original or not would not be possible without any samples of unambiguously original ZIPs, thankfully provided via some still-existing FTP sites, sometimes at FilePlanet, but mainly thanks to whatever was preserved by the Wayback Machine -- which is a lot more than I originally thought back in the early 2010s. Also some archived websites provided the exact file size in bytes, which is still helpful even if the downloads themselves were not archived by the Wayback Machine.

For unpacked files on a CD, I've noticed that using 7-Zip or WinRAR to extract them from a CD image might result in the date/times stamps being off due to time zone differences. Whenever possible, I try to mount an ISO in DOSBox SVN Daum and copy the files from the ISO to DOSBox's virtual hard drive, which seems to preserve the "original" date and time stamps -- again, compared against known authentic unmodified ZIPs.

I've been fairly vigilant on preserving the file dates of ZIPs/self-extracting EXEs themselves from CDs (when possible) for the future possibility of providing an offline version - does Info-ZIP preserve the file date of the ZIP or does it modify it? That's my main concern regarding stripping ZIP comments. Of course, there's also the rare instance of when the authors make ZIP comments themselves (ie. Flip Aces, Electro-Cute v1.00, Football for Windows v4.0, Win Slot v2.13) so those will never be touched.

Thankfully with regards to FILE_ID.DIZ files I've had good success with finding copies without those files - at the same time, when you read enough of them it becomes easy to pick up when they were written by the authors themselves - I've been making a good effort to preserve those, only a couple of them have been ambiguous.

Since I use Linux, it's fairly easy to preserve file dates by just mounting the CD and running cp -p and it keeps the exact date and time. That said, I have noticed that ext4 filesystem permissions seem to be preserved within the ZIP file. I might need to transfer the content to a Windows system and repack those pre-extracted sources.

Good point regarding archived websites listing the exact file size - that's something I will keep in mind.

While I never took much interest in Win16 games (apart from a few titles like the Exile series RPGs), but perhaps you could find […]
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While I never took much interest in Win16 games (apart from a few titles like the Exile series RPGs), but perhaps you could find something useful in this topic, and maybe here too.

Also concerning obscure Win16 game suggestions, you might want to look at the archived site of French shareware publisher TLK Games. They had DOS stuff but also Windows, which I think in some cases was Win16, including Farocar, a neat Soko-Ban variant.

Regarding game suggestions, there's a blog called Juegos Liberados that lists liberated (=officially declared freeware) games which can be listed by platform, here's what they have for Win16:
https://juegosliberados.blogspot.com/search/l … l/Windows%203.1

Thanks a lot for these - I appreciate lists like this the most as it helps with knowing what's out there.

Oh, and I can also share a Win16 game that you appear not to have yet: Rogue's Quest, which is a graphical roguelike, originally […]
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Oh, and I can also share a Win16 game that you appear not to have yet: Rogue's Quest, which is a graphical roguelike, originally a Win16 app then ported by author to Win32. The Wayback Machine has preserved only this latter Win32 release (which I gather is the latest version in the game's development), but I found one of the Win16 builds elsewhere: RQ10G.ZIP. DiscMaster only finds an even earlier version, but you might want to archive that too. The game also had quite a few add-on scenarios.

I would certainly suggest Stars!, a shareware space 4X game. The latest shareware version is available here. The game was later acquired by Empire Interactive and sold commercially, a demo was available from their website. Both are working Wayback Machine links. The demo has an 80-turn limit, but the shareware version only has a limit on game world size (IIRC).

Bad Toys 3D -- shareware, you can get the ZIP version here.

Nitemare 3D -- Win16 shareware at RGB Classic Games.

There's also a Win16 demo of The Rise & Rule of Ancient Empires, found here.

As leilei correctly pointed out, I already have a large pile of games that are already shortlisted for being added next when I do the next content update in July - there's 37 286-compatible Windows 3.1 games where I've archived all versions I could find, some number of 386-minimum games (fun note, I currently have 26 versions of Operation: Inner Space archived), and another 195 folders of extracted ZIPs where I was testing for Windows 3.0 compatibility. DracoNihil did point out to me that the file command in Linux does distinguish between Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1 within the NE header, so moving forward I have a significantly more efficient way of testing the minimum Windows version especially as I move beyond 1993. With regards to those archived games, I haven't done any kind of documentation or screenshots for those games at this point.

Couple of specific notes about the above games you've listed - I have v1.2 of Nitemare 3D archived, and I believe I may have encountered v1.4 or v1.5 on a CD I have locally stored but I could be wrong on that. Untested as of yet, but I don't expect anything beyond 386+WinG. Bad Toys 3D I have v1.0, v1.9, v1.91 and v1.95 archived - v1.0 is quite literally the best example of GDI usage I've seen in any Windows game, and I'd be very surprised if anything surpasses it. The fact it has built-in demos is icing on the cake - if only it had a timedemo function.

The chess programme Centaur has a Win16 version, available here. It doesn't have the fancy 3D board of the DOS version though.

Atomic -- Win16 clone of Atomix, source code included.

These post-1998 games on the other hand are exactly what I'm interested in feedback from with regards to what to individually add to the site - thanks!

leileilol wrote on 2025-05-24, 23:19:

Though I can suggest some way of listing networked play support. Thinking about Lord Soth's page...

Good idea - I'll work on this. I might as well go all the way and just replicate what Lord Soth had with regards to what to list for multiplayer support, including local multiplayer.

DracoNihil wrote on 2025-05-25, 04:21:

I talked about the "TC Games" with him on stream, unfortunately at the time he was testing Windows 3.0 compatibility and the TC games are for 3.1, and I also just learned that apparently all those 3D graphics it does is just through GDI itself, no WinG.

There are some I don't actually have the shareware copies of, like the Spy Hunter clone for example. I only have "Asteroids", "Bout", "Car War", "Defender", "Space Invaders", "Joust", "Ping Pong", "Star Fighter", "Skirmish", "Star Trek", "Sword Play", "Trek War," and "Virtual World".

All of these I pulled off Disc 2 of "The Complete Encyclopedia of Games on 2 CDs!" by "Microforum Publishing".

I did eventually find "Basketball", so now I have the complete TC Games collection - "Image Editor" that can be seen here is elusive, however.

leileilol wrote on 2025-05-24, 23:19:

Though I can suggest some way of listing networked play support. Thinking about Lord Soth's page...

I was going to say the same! on my own little spreadsheet I list:
Release year (which you already have)
Sound support (which you already have)
Multiplayer (Split screen, Null Modem, Network)

Do love the fact it's Netscape 3 compatible, for me that's THE browser for Win3x and funny enough I still miss it, maybe cause it was how I first accessed the internet?
However it's missing from your utilities folder!

Nice site, thanks! I checked and you already have all the games that were in my games group in Program Manager in December 1991, so unfortunately I have nothing to contribute there.

Have you considered including icons as well as screen shots? Perhaps they would be "useful" as people might recognise them.

640x480x16. You need to enable EMS (I have 16 MB RAM) or you will get out of memory messages when trying to load numerous images.

Current priority list of games to document is as follows:
WinG games
Win32s games

I see you have only two WinG games.

One interesting game is Microsoft Fury 3. It uses both WIN32s and WinG, even if it was marketed for "Windows 95". I think I saw a demo while searching game magazine CD archive on Archive.org.

Also, early versions of WinDOOM were WIN32s compatible: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/WinDoom_(Microsoft)

You can find a small list of WinG games here:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_WinG_games

DEAT wrote on 2025-05-29, 00:41:

I've been fairly vigilant on preserving the file dates of ZIPs/self-extracting EXEs themselves from CDs (when possible) for the future possibility of providing an offline version - does Info-ZIP preserve the file date of the ZIP or does it modify it? That's my main concern regarding stripping ZIP comments. Of course, there's also the rare instance of when the authors make ZIP comments themselves (ie. Flip Aces, Electro-Cute v1.00, Football for Windows v4.0, Win Slot v2.13) so those will never be touched.

Do ZIP files actually store their creation/modification date somewhere? (not the date stamps of the files inside) I think LHA archives do that, but I'm not sure about ZIP.

It's been quite some time, but I do believe I ran byte-by-byte comparisons between known original files and those restored via the techniques that I described above, and I think that after stripping the comment the resulting file was byte-by-byte identical to the original one (using the COMP command to compare the two).

Here's what I wrote about this back in 2016:

[Edit] On a side note, it appears that external comments can be appended to an authentic file, as exemplified by this distribution of Duke Nukem II. Removing the comment (e.g. by using the Info-ZIP edit comment function) does not in any way violate the authenticity verification procedure. This means that files with external comments can be cleaned up without breaking authenticity.

The discussion was concerning PKZIP's Authenticity Verification routine though, but I gather that if ZIP files somehow document their creation date, the AV feature would detect this piece of data being modified too (?).

If you're talking about the date stamps on the ZIP files as appearing on a particular CD, I feel that generally these are quite arbitrary and will most likely indicate the time when the file was downloaded to the machine where the CD was put together. However, if you want to preserve those, there's no reason why you should not manually modify the date/time stamps back to their original values after removing the extra comments and FILE_ID.DIZ files.

DEAT wrote on 2025-05-29, 00:41:

Thankfully with regards to FILE_ID.DIZ files I've had good success with finding copies without those files - at the same time, when you read enough of them it becomes easy to pick up when they were written by the authors themselves - I've been making a good effort to preserve those, only a couple of them have been ambiguous.

With DOS games at least, I noticed that third-party FILE_ID.DIZ files often have extremely odd dates, like from 1987 (for a reason that was never fully clear to me), clearly standing out from the actual dates of the game files.

Generally, I've always tried to track down as many ZIPs of the same release/version of a game, if it comes as a zipped collection of loose files, to try to determine which comprise the original pack. Also thankfully, not a few shareware game devs would very kindly list the exact ZIP contents somewhere in the documentation.

I also love this convention when the timestamps on the files actually indicate the version number (thus 1:00am/pm means version 1.00 and so on), but it wasn't too widespread and only some authors followed it.

DEAT wrote on 2025-05-29, 00:41:

Good point regarding archived websites listing the exact file size - that's something I will keep in mind.

Here's a fairly well preserved site (not all downloads though) that was not an official source but still has the exact file sizes at least for some downloads:
The Gamer's Inn
The games are categorized by genre (very loosely though) and marked by platform (standard Windows icon means Win3.x, the Win95 icons has a red "95" imposed over it), although sometimes there are errors.

Of course, there is also no guarantee that the files referenced are in any way original or come from third-party sources and have been modified in some way or other.

Hi, I think the mismatch with file dates could be because the files had been re-packed.
It's also worth to keep in mind that ZIP wasn't the only archive format in use.

Japan used to use LZH, which also was popular in the west once.
Amiga and Atari ST use LHA archives to this very day, still.
Then there was ARC format in the mid-80s, which was standard on CP/M.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHA_(file_format)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(file_format)

The shareware files might have been shipped with a different archive format originally, thus.
So the PD/shareware collections on CD-ROMs over time had been altered slightly, maybe, in order to be used by DOS/Windows users with then-current PKZip and WinZIP.

Hello everyone... How happy I feel, knowing that there are many Windows 3.1x enthusiasts just like me, I'm really passionate about everything I have to do with this graphical interface, and more and more every time hehehe. My dream would be for Microsoft to release the source code of Windows 3.1... Anyway, long live Windows 3.1x!!

^Hi, I think it has already leaked surfaced years ago, along with that of W2K/DOS6..
But I won't go into any detail here. Just stating the obvious. It's an open secret, so to say.

PS: Windows 3.1 had been used in many places.
It's in Windows NT, in OS/2, in the C64 Web.It (as WebOS), in the Tandy VIS console (as Modular Windows), in Windows 9x Setup (in mini.cab).
It also can be run in a window in DESQVIEW/X and on Unix/Linux (WABI).

The predecessor Windows 3.0 existed in WLO, a Windows runtime for 16-Bit OS/2.
In the 90s, the Windows API was almost becoming an industry specification.

bocke wrote on 2025-05-30, 11:28:

One interesting game is Microsoft Fury 3. It uses both WIN32s and WinG, even if it was marketed for "Windows 95". I think I saw a demo while searching game magazine CD archive on Archive.org.

FURY3.EXE does not use WinG whatsoever. There's no references to the DLL file anywhere and does not come with it either on the CD-ROM. As far as I know it just uses custom GDI code.

The demo's Fury3x.exe does have WinG function references relating to stretching BLTs through WING32.DLL

On topic of WinG, one of the earliest WinG games i've ever played was Defendroid off one of those CD-ROM Today! discs then. It also used Dispdib (a Video for Windows component) to do 320x200x256 on 3.1 so maybe having VFW/Dispdib could also be worth noting.

^Thank you very much for the info. ^^

Speaking of WinG (and Win32s), Creatures! came to mind..
But so far, only own statements show up on search engine.
Emulators running on Win95/Win32s also used it, I think.
There's also a WinG benchmark from Japan, I think.
Test suite for Win32s/WinG?