Quick update. I just would like to say that there's still some more stuff coming in the future.
Please stay tuned.

Hi! Here's another little SuperNES front-end for Windows 3.1x!
- It's for the DOS version of the portable emulator Snes9X. Yay! ^^

As far as I can tell, it works. Games can be selected and run.
But please everyone keep in mind that it was an early Beta, still.

Like previously, I've included an early DOS version that's close to the release date of the front-end.
Both are merely a year apart, so the parameters used should still work, more or less. Hope that's okay.

Credits/Wallpaper: Purple SuperNES emblem, Samus Varia Suit, Samus (Super Metroid game sprite)

Jo22 wrote on 2023-10-24, 01:47:

Hi! Here's another little SuperNES front-end for Windows 3.1x!
- It's for the DOS version of the portable emulator Snes9X. Yay! ^^

interesting!

i used to enjoy using delphi or vb to create simple front ends for mame and some command line emulators

simple enough so that compiling in delphi1 or vb3 was also possible win win3.1

i still occasionally wrap command lines with a simple gui

i was always quite impressed with some of the features and look of the front ends, there was quite the scene around them at one time

gerry wrote on 2023-10-24, 09:52:

interesting! […]
Show full quote

Jo22 wrote on 2023-10-24, 01:47:

Hi! Here's another little SuperNES front-end for Windows 3.1x!
- It's for the DOS version of the portable emulator Snes9X. Yay! ^^

interesting!

i used to enjoy using delphi or vb to create simple front ends for mame and some command line emulators

simple enough so that compiling in delphi1 or vb3 was also possible win win3.1

i still occasionally wrap command lines with a simple gui

i was always quite impressed with some of the features and look of the front ends, there was quite the scene around them at one time

Cool! Thank you for stopping by! 😃

Yes, I also remember being Visual Basic 3 being very popular back then!
Many of the Windows programs on shareware CD-ROMs asked for vbrun300.dll, I remember.

Including one of my favorite games of the time, Duel. It was a modern implementation of Space War.
I've often just sat there, watching the little space ship orbitting around the simulated sun.
Due to the slowness of my 286's VGA card (on motherboard), everything was happening in slow motion (cinematic).
The VGA card was an original ATI VGA Wonder, probably interfaced via 8-Bit bus.

At home, I think we didn't have VB3, though. My father was an early adopter and had the original Visual Basic (1.0) still in use.

At the time, I wished for a copy of VB2, but I couldn't afford buy a copy of myself.
So I tinkered with the free "Working Model" of VB2.
Together with my dad's VB1, I was able to write programs in VB1 first and later import them into VB2 for experimentation.

This was a fun time back then, before VB was fused with Internet technology. ^^

I've also used the predecessor to Delphi, Turbo Pascal for Windows.
But it lacked the fun GUI designer of VB, making things a bit more tedious to use.

gerry wrote on 2023-10-24, 09:52:

i still occasionally wrap command lines with a simple gui

i was always quite impressed with some of the features and look of the front ends, there was quite the scene around them at one time

Sounds cool! Please tell me more, if you can! 😎👍
My introduction to emulation happened ca. ~2000, but I was mainly focused on getting a specific MZ-700 emulator going on Windows.

Which was tricky, because the Japanese author used an eastern copy of Windows
and I merely had been running a western copy of Windows 98SE (no Unicode support, no Far-East character support).

That caused the text characters to be misaligned/unreadable in the emulator somehow.

After that, I was busy with school for a while, missing out on emulation scene.
To my surprise, after when Windows XP was out, many older emulators suddenly worked fine, I remember.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-10-26, 21:40:

Sounds cool! Please tell me more, if you can! 😎👍 My introduction to emulation happened ca. ~2000, but I was mainly focused on ge […]
Show full quote

gerry wrote on 2023-10-24, 09:52:

i still occasionally wrap command lines with a simple gui

i was always quite impressed with some of the features and look of the front ends, there was quite the scene around them at one time

Sounds cool! Please tell me more, if you can! 😎👍
My introduction to emulation happened ca. ~2000, but I was mainly focused on getting a specific MZ-700 emulator going on Windows.

Which was tricky, because the Japanese author used an eastern copy of Windows
and I merely had been running a western copy of Windows 98SE (no Unicode support, no Far-East character support).

That caused the text characters to be misaligned/unreadable in the emulator somehow.

After that, I was busy with school for a while, missing out on emulation scene.
To my surprise, after when Windows XP was out, many older emulators suddenly worked fine, I remember.

late 90's was maybe the most 'exciting' periods in emulation - genecyst, nesticle, meka, mame and lots more and these were mostly in DOS, there were few in windows 3.1 which is why its interesting to see them now and then. Some came with their own GUI but others didnt, mame notably, so there were various enthusiasts creating GUIs for them, i'm sure they are still out there archived but i dont remember the sites addresses

i remember making front ends for mame and i think there was a sega master system one called 'massage' too, as well as others - the ones i made were never as feature rich as the ones that rose to the top online but through creating them i also further enjoyed doing very simple front ends for command line apps, simple enough mostly, often just building a string and using shell! sometimes a bit more like viewing snapshots and so on

indeed the emulation scene by 2000 was somewhat mature - many emulators worked absolutely great by then and i remember and still use zsnes, gens, meka and so on, in fact one of my 32bit win xp machines is dedicated to all the old emulators. rarer systems like mz700 and others were always tricker to set up and run

now emulation tends to be wrapped up into multi system emulation which is great, but somehow the variation and quirkiness of the early days is faded

gerry wrote on 2023-10-28, 16:06:

late 90's was maybe the most 'exciting' periods in emulation - genecyst, nesticle, meka, mame and lots more and these were mostly in DOS, there were few in windows 3.1 which is why its interesting to see them now and then. Some came with their own GUI but others didnt, mame notably, so there were various enthusiasts creating GUIs for them, i'm sure they are still out there archived but i dont remember the sites addresses

Yeah, exactly! 😃
The "early days"* of emulation were fascinating, with the web still being young.
Many of the late 90s websites still had that mysterious flair onto them.
Dark HTML pages with bright text etc. I miss those days, even if I was late to the party!
I believe you can be rightfully proud to have been around back then! ^^

(*on PC, I mean. A few emulation projects had started in the 80s already. CP/M, ViC20, PET, ZX81 and TRS-80 emulation on home computers.
Amigas/Ataris emulating an Apple II or basic 1981 era IBM PC etc. The more sophisticated stuff started in the 90s, I think.)

gerry wrote on 2023-10-28, 16:06:

now emulation tends to be wrapped up into multi system emulation which is great, but somehow the variation and quirkiness of the early days is faded

Yes, that sums it up pretty well, I think! 😎
That's why I tried to preserve (and discover) as much as possible, that's why I got the idea for this thread/topic here in first place. 😃

Even though the focus is on Win 3.1, I keep backups of all the other emulators I come across.

PS: I can't state often enough how grateful I am for all the support/replies here.
I'm learning a lot this way and it's very motivational to me to keep going. Thank you, too! 🙂👍

Jo22 wrote on 2023-11-03, 17:22:

The "early days"* of emulation were fascinating, with the web still being young.
Many of the late 90s websites still had that mysterious flair onto them.
Dark HTML pages with bright text etc. I miss those days, even if I was late to the party!

ah yes, a couple of examples of back then, which you may have seen (well, year 2000 as wayback doesnt have much from earlier - but still gives the look and feel of back then)

https://web.archive.org/web/20000620201510/ht … n/genecyst.html Zophar was one of the main hubs for updates and emulators, its still around but maybe not so central to the scene now
https://web.archive.org/web/20000815235556/ht … power.org/meka/
https://worldofspectrum.net/warajevo/index.html (an emulator i found out about with unique development history, web page is from now but looks like those of the time)

some old geocities remnants rehosted by oocities who, along with archive.org, seem to be the only geocities archivists that havent given way to spam. nothing much works anymore (in some ways good as some of these sites had downloads of things! but they give typical look of fan made emulation sites from the geocities days (also lycos, fortunecity and so on)
https://www.oocities.org/hugolam/ an old front end
https://www.oocities.org/emulation_station/emu_nes.html
https://www.oocities.org/timessquare/realm/7209/

no windows 3.1 'native' emulators in there though, i think with dos 32 bit extenders and the established tools for dos development there was just little attention on windows 3.1, and also in part because when the internet (www ! ) was young the PCs of the day were migrating to win 95 and so this became the new focus of development work

windows 3.x holds that special in between state, it only really having been there for a few years, 95 coming in so quickly to dominate as the OS for any PC from late 486 days

gerry wrote on 2023-11-08, 10:06:

no windows 3.1 'native' emulators in there though, i think with dos 32 bit extenders and the established tools for dos development there was just little attention on windows 3.1, and also in part because when the internet (www ! ) was young the PCs of the day were migrating to win 95 and so this became the new focus of development work.

Thank you for the links with the frontends, gerry!
I'll check them out when I'm at home. ^^

gerry wrote on 2023-11-08, 10:06:

windows 3.x holds that special in between state, it only really having been there for a few years, 95 coming in so quickly to dominate as the OS for any PC from late 486 days

Yes, I couldn't have said it any better. ^^

I guess that's why I'm still so fond of Windows 3.1x, also.
I used to be more of a 90s kid and the 16-Bit era was special to me.

The early 90s were a time of convergence.
Back then, 80s pop culture was still alive, the mentality of the people was still similar.

Up until the middle of the decade, the previous decade still had left an echo behind it that could be heard (felt).

And Windows 3 was a 90s technology with its roots in the 80s.
When I now look at my localized version of Windows 3.x, I recognize things like the language (sayings, wordings), the old spelling/grammar and our old currency.

Everything looks so strangely familiar, yet far away.
Like reading original issues of comic books, which had been released years later with updated graphics and new speech bubbles.

It's a strange experience at times.

The early-mid 90s were full of weird things, like early VR stuff (see movie Revolver) and birth of the world wide web and cyber café's,

While simultaneously, online services of old were still being around.

It was a time in which the analog world and the digital world were mostly balanced.

In which people bought fax modems (!) to send/receive faxes via PC.
At same time, though, game consoles learned to go online (bit not necessarily via internet yet).
Services like SatellaView in Japan or SegaNet in the states..

All of this slowly, but steadily changed in the mid-90s, when the 90s got its own face/personality.

Things like hip-hop, boy bands/girl bands and so on emerged.

Fluffy hair cuts, pastel coloured cloths and wool sweaters had to make way to the fashion we've got now.

Inline skates replaced roller blades, Skateboards became overly popular, just to be vanishing soon after without a trace.

Even during beta programme, Windows 95 got overly popular and took over the computing landscape over night.

Interestingly, this worked out rather harmonic, since it integrated into existing infrastructures.

It didn't force users to give up on existing DOS/Windows 3.x based eco system.
Old DOS drivers and networks continued to work, as did Windows 3 software.
Merely Windows 2.x software was left out (except if patched via Mark30 utility).

Windows 95 was sort of a turning point, but the hard cut didn't happen up until Windows 98, I believe, when 32-Bit took over.
In the Windows 95 days, 16-Bit development tools were still being used (like VB3).

Soon after, Windows NT was on the rise, too.
RISC architectures like ARM, MIPS and Power PC looked promising.

And in the middle of all of this was Windows 3.x, still.
It was the basis for Windows for Workgroups, a legacy core inside Windows 95, part of the 16-Bit subsystem of both Windows NT and OS/2.

On RISC ports of Windows NT, only Windows 2.x/3.x applications could run without a recompile (through NTVDM/WoW).
32-Bit Windows applications required a recompile or the optional FX!32 emulator.

Windows 3.1x also was available on *nix via Wabi, making commercial applications available to these platforms.

Moreover, Windows 3.x was also available by IBM.
The C64 WebIt computer had used an IBM DOS/Windows.

On Macintosh platform SoftWindows started out with Windows 3.1, too.

So all in all, it was quite a memorable development. With Windows 3.x I saw the computing landscape changing over the years.
Because, it provided a comparison to what was before and what came after it.

The differences between the early 90s and late 90s/early 2000s seem to be minor at first,
but if we look at it closely, it's like a very different society.

If you fell into a coma in 1993 and then woke up in 1998, you would barely recognize your home town anymore.
The culture and mentality had changed a lot for it being merely 5 years.

Here are two YT videos that may give an idea.
They're video game related, of course. 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfZWyHt4jTM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NMaJu0IcsU

As we can see, the people back then were overly calm and polite, despite being from different countries or continents.

Nowadays popular word "offensive" isn't being heard a single time.
It's just random people being acting social, as if it was normal.

Personally, I think that's what I miss the most about the 90s.
Followed by programming in Visual Basic Classic, of course! 😁

Edit: What I also fondly remember are the 486 PC days.
Back in the early-mid 90s, PC shops had their then-current PC line being showcased in the window.
If you passed by on street, you saw various scrensavers and animations running.
And inside the shops/stores, about 30 or more PC monitors showing Mystify, Flying Windows, Marquee, Starfield Simulation etc.

Edit: Or let me put it this way, back in the early-mid 90s, we still used CRTs and 5,25" drives/floppies in daily life (even Pentium big tower running Windows 95 had them, still).

The fictional worlds seen in Japanimation (Bubblegum Crash, Dirty Pair, Cyber City Oedo 808 etc) or films like Blade Runner didn't look dated yet. Things were still believable, sort of.
VHS, Laser Disc and CD-ROM were still seen as the current gen, as well.

In fact, HDTV had started out on VHS, too! 😃
The technology was called DVHS at the time.
It had existed in the early 90s, already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT4lDU-QLUY

Jo22 wrote on 2023-11-08, 12:32:

The differences between the early 90s and late 90s/early 2000s seem to be minor at first, but if we look at it closely, it's lik […]
Show full quote

The differences between the early 90s and late 90s/early 2000s seem to be minor at first,
but if we look at it closely, it's like a very different society.

If you fell into a coma in 1993 and then woke up in 1998, you would barely recognize your home town anymore.
The culture and mentality had changed a lot for it being merely 5 years.

Here are two YT videos that may give an idea.
They're video game related, of course. 😉

.. a video wall of separate crt monitors, thats now so nostalgic somehow!!

that's an interesting point, i have thought that living in the year 1990 in some ways has more in common with the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's than living in the year 1999 did - as that small amount of time saw the advent of widespread cell/mobile phone use, the emergence of the 'world wide web', a huge uptake in PC usage (in work and home), the end of the 'cold war' and break up of ussr and warsaw pact, the development of china and ever more global trade and more things too (at least as viewed from north america, europe)

in 1990 a television and a microwave were still expensive, by 1999 they were cheap compared to salary - same with the PC, the sheer volume of goods seemed to increase ever more and be more available

sure other periods saw changes too but the 90's was a stealthy change - it didn't feel like a revolution at the time, but looking back - it really was, it turned over into a new era, the start of the one we are in now in many ways

perhaps that's partly why DOS and windows 3.1 seem particularly nostalgic for some, because they lie just behind the horizon between 'then' and 'now'

Quick update. Found an interesting site called Emulator History in Japan (archived).
The encoding is pre-Unicode (Shift JIS). You may use that and copy&paste everything into Google Translator. (^_^)

Quick update. Do you like the textured rattle and hum of a VHS tape being sucked into the womb of a 1983 JVC HR-7100 VCR? 🙂
If so, there is (was) a Museum of Endangered Sounds.

There's an article about it on https://www.wired.co.uk/article/museum-of-endangered-sounds

- Beware, though, it's from about 10 years ago. Now a retro thing on its own.

The VCR:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3McFNoUuM2s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXyXvG6LB2s

Quick update. Found something interesting. Not really about Windows 3.1 per se, but I'll make an exception.

There used to be a Windows 95 based piece of accessory hardware for the good ol' DMG 01.

It essentially simulated a printer, it was a form of digital frame grabber.

It thus does fall into the developers tools category, like debuggers, programmable cassettes and things. :)

Source: http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2014/06/ … ra-ms-twig.html

Source: Flickr

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PEKobEU_oo

Quick update. Back to emulation.. Some interesting articles from the 90s about emulation can be found at https://www.atarihq.com/danb/emulation.shtml

Like, for example:

"How Do I Write an Emulator?" Part 1

"Emulating Games - Getting Started (v0.01a)"

Quick update. Found a handy little overview about the 6502 family of cheap 8-Bitters.

"6502 Variants

6507 - This is a identical to the standard 6502 except that it only has 13 external address lines and no interrupt inputs. It was used in the Atari 2600.

65C02 - This is a CMOS version of the 6502 that has a few added instructions.

6510 - This is the version of the 6502 that is used in the Commodore 64.
It is almost the same as the 6502 except that it has a built in 8-bit I/O port.

65C816S - This is an expanded 16-bit version of the 6502.
It has 16 bit registers and a 24 bit program counter, and can run at up to 20MHz.
It also has a standard 6502 'emulation' mode.
This processor is used in the SNES and the Apple II GS.

SALLY - This is the version of the 6502 that is used in all but the earliest Atari 8-bit computers.
It is identical to the standard 6502 except that it has a HALT input for stopping the processor and tri-stating the system bus so that other chips in the system can do DMA."

Source: Dan B's 6502 Tech Page (archived)

I think that's interesting. I just learnt that the SNES and Apple II GS had something in common. Cool, thanks! ^^

gerry wrote on 2023-11-08, 16:34:

.. a video wall of separate crt monitors, thats now so nostalgic somehow!!

I think the same, even though I haven't seen such video walls so often IRL.
They remind me of a broadcast studio, though.
It has something to it, I think. 🙂👍

gerry wrote on 2023-11-08, 16:34:

that's an interesting point, i have thought that living in the year 1990 in some ways has more in common with the 50's, 60's, 70 […]
Show full quote

that's an interesting point, i have thought that living in the year 1990 in some ways has more in common with the
50's, 60's, 70's and 80's than living in the year 1999 did - as that small amount of time saw the advent of widespread cell/mobile phone use,
the emergence of the 'world wide web', a huge uptake in PC usage (in work and home), the end of the 'cold war' and break up of ussr and warsaw pact,
the development of china and ever more global trade and more things too (at least as viewed from north america, europe)

These are good points, I think.
Probably it's also related with the 90s being the end of the 20th century.

In my country, reunion had just happened in early 90s and we got a lot of "other" countrymen/countrywomen over night.
Not that this was a bad thing, whatsoever, we got along pretty well with each others.

It's just.. The new citizens felt a bit strange to us at times. And vice versa. The differences in culture/mentality were just very drastically at times.

Many of them didn't even owned a land-line telephone at home before, or so I was told.
VHS and telefax machines, neither. Some had black/white TVs, because colour models were so expensive/rare.

By contrast, many of "us" had been using C64, NES and Videotext/Teletext capable colour TVs since the 80s.

So it wad kind of a culture shock, too. To both sides, I guess.
On the other hand, there had been some slightly unrealistic expectations, too.

Our new citizens knew the other half of the country merely by TV or by the descriptions of the relatives living here.
Before the wall fell, some had assumed we're living a carefree life in the land of milk and honey.

I mean, that wasn't totally untrue in direct comparison, but it seems they didn't know how brutal our system can be, as well.
In their part of the country, the living standard was lower, but everything was slower paced, also. There was more time (example).
Social nets everywhere, with only a few being homeless. Everyone got a home, even though it was very cheap and mass produced.

Children care was available, even if it wasn't so great, maybe.
I'm saying that because there was some indoctrination going on, as well, judging by documentaries.
Here in the west, at the time, child care was more oldskool with kindergarden or grandparents/parents raising children at home.

But there also were positive things coming from the east:
Women did do men's work for decades, like it was not uncommon in the east of Europe.
And they didn't change their mind when they moved over.
So the old "women belong in the kitchen and raise kids" point-of-view of the west
was going to be questioned, too, which caused funny situations, also in talk shows on TV. 😂

So yeah, it was quite a turning point, all in all. 😄
Those slightly "weird" people that came to us were bringing us a breeze of fresh air, too, so to say.
Being a "few years behind", they perhaps kept the 80s alive even a bit longer, even if it wasn't their intention.
Their fresh interest in CB radio and American movies, too. Our video rentals were rather happy, I think.

_
Speaking of video games, it's funny or remarkable that the NES was so long-lived.
I got my last game (new in a video game shop) in ~1996, for example.
About 10 years after the console was introduced in my country.

In east Europe, at about same time, the NES was popular too (Dendy).
It's homebrew scene, bootleg and emulation scene was well alive.

In the mid-90s, before I bought my latest NES game, many emulators were already around for it.
Even for Amiga, OS/2, Macintosh and Windows 3..
I think that's fascinating. 😎

gerry wrote on 2023-11-08, 16:34:

in 1990 a television and a microwave were still expensive, by 1999 they were cheap compared to salary
- same with the PC, the sheer volume of goods seemed to increase ever more and be more available

Yes, there was quite some change. Satellite TV, too.
My father had a satellite receiver from the 80s, which was very advanced for its time.

It was an older technology using an LNC (low noise converter) rather than an LNB (low noise block converter).
In our part of our home town, we were one of the earliest families to have a satellite dish installed.

We also had online access via both CompuServe (for international e-mail, tech helplines/forums)
and BTX (our national service, useful for home banking, booking a trip, online telephone book etc).

These were the two main online service providers here. AOL arrived a few years later, Internet was a niche, still.

At the time, early-mid-90s, there already was ISDN around, with up to 64kbit/s (or 128Kbit/s by combing two lines).
But sadly, it wasn't available in our part of the town in the early 90s.

So we had to use modem connection using a data/fax modem.
Unfortunately, the dial-in nodes in our neighborhood were very slow.
About 9k6 at best. 2400 bps were common. 1200/75 Baud the fallback.

CompuServe wasn't any better, because it was an US American service.
The mainframes were located in overseas, so all the traffic had to pass over other national networks (like BTX or Datex-P).
True CompuServe dial-in nodes operated by CompuServe itself came later.

gerry wrote on 2023-11-08, 16:34:

sure other periods saw changes too but the 90's was a stealthy change
- it didn't feel like a revolution at the time, but looking back - it really was,
it turned over into a new era, the start of the one we are in now in many ways

Stealthy change is a good description, yes! ^^
I remember having a pager (beeper) with me in the mid-90s and it was considered normal or modern.
By 1999, everyone was like "what's a pager?!".
That's when the Nokia mobiles, Tomb Raider and the Playstation were in fashion.

gerry wrote on 2023-11-08, 16:34:

perhaps that's partly why DOS and windows 3.1 seem particularly nostalgic for some,
because they lie just behind the horizon between 'then' and 'now'

It surely is for me. 😁 I just wonder if others do feel like this, too. 🤷‍♂️

Windows 3.1, climbing trees, playing with r/c models, bike tours with friends, using a telephone booth,
playing video games with friends in front of a small CRT TV are synonyms to me for another time.

I'm sure that people who had their youth in the 70s may also think/feel similar about how things had changed for them in the 80s.
The hippie era was slowly vanishing, for example. Cable TV got overly popular in the 80s. There was MTV..

But all in all, things were still recognizable, maybe. People didn't have to change, if they didn't want to.
They could keep using their Chippendale TV/Radio cabinets.

By comparison, the changes that happened between 1990 and 1999 were much more hefty, maybe.
By the late 90s, PCs and Internet were more and more dominating the daily life of the people.

At least here in western part of Europe, I mean. And countries in other places with similar lifestyle.
I'm not sure how it was in the Balkans or 90s Russia.
These places felt as if they had a lot of need to catch up, maybe.

Which wasn't that bad, maybe. They had the privilege to have both 80s pop culture and 90s tech.
Or in other words, they had the positive parts of the 80s a bit longer than "us".

Speaking under correction here, of course. It's difficult to make oneself a proper opinion from the far.

Edit: Changed the formatting a bit (on PC).
Edit: Link added.

Quick update. Found something interesting. Merely partially Windows 3.1 related, though.
It's an Japanese art gallery. Found it while searching Japanese sites for early Win32(s) emulators..

Link: http://www.ateliermw.com/cglib/software.html#SW0023

The site is sorted in several ways (by year, by program etc).

^Here's a piece of manga artwork drawn on Windows 3.x! Using Paintbrush/PC Paintbrush!

Quick update. I've already found a handful of emulators in the past weeks that almost ran on Windows 3.1x+Win32s.

Like, for example: 65C02 Simulator, some SBC emulators (KIM1, SYM-1, AIM-65), some console emulators etc.

What finally broke them either was a not supported functon in w32scomb.dll or lack of DirectX.

Interestingly, the relocation table wasn't so much of a problem.
Many emulators tested were using Delphi 2 or 3, which by default includes that table.

However, after running the programs, they complain about missing resource files.

Something doesn't work, probably because Win32s lacks an API function that's been used.

I believe, it surely would be possible to fix that.
Source code is available for some of the projects, so modifications could be made, Delphi 2 could be used for compilation..

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know what I'm doing right now.
I know it's been while that a real Windows 3.1x capable emulator was being showcased here.

I'll do my best to find some more! 🙂

Please have a nice weekend, everyone! ^^

Best wishes, Jo22

Hi, quick update. There's an mirror w/ older releases of AppleWin/Apple2Win, with releases dating back to the 90s.
https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimo … .net/emulators/

PS: Also worth a try is the article "Emulation Case Study" on same site (PDF).

Quick Update. I'm currently checking the known list(s) of early MS Windows emulators.
So far, we've discovered almost all of them. Yay!

Currently, I've got a few more things to test.
At least one more Z80 emulator seems to run just fine on Windows 3.1.

Technically, a few TRS-80 and SBC emulators do run in a DOS window on Windows, as well.
However, that's not exactly what we're looking for, maybe.

Systems like Wabi won't run DOS applications, but real Win16 applications.
That's why I'm hesitating to include them, but not Windows based front-ends.
I hope that makes any sense. 😅

PS: There are Win32 emulators that could run on Windows 3.1+Win32s, but won't.
Like the venerable ABC80 emulator.

However, these often DO run on Windows NT 3.x and OS/2 Warp+ODIN..
Which in turn gives me a bit of a headache.

They're fine emulators, but the focus here is on good ol' Windows 3.1x.
- A platform that's not very well supported in other places.

Hm. Best I can do is to keep them in a separate folder structure, so things won't get mixed up.
But that's another story. 😅

I just want to let you know that I'm still looking for things.
A few versions of the Famicom emulator are missing still, too.

Quick update. Found the old site of Ami99, an early TI99/4A simulator for Windows.

I had little information on this one, except it being a predecessor to Classic 99, and so I hoped it was WinG based or had a GDI fallback of some sort.
Unfortunately, it required DirectX, VS C++6 and Allegro already. So it was very modern, already.

What's interesting, though, the site had other interesting stuff, like a viewer utility for an furry art CD.
It's interesting how those hobbies do cross each other's path so often, I think.
I mean, the Amiga scene, or a part of, at least, had similar interests.

Somehow, things like radio tinkering (the mother of electronics), astronomy, flight sims, cartoons/manga, drawing, music, role playing, storry telling,
sci-fi, video games (in general), writing and computing go hand in hand.
Chances are high that similar people share one or more interests here.

Historically, role playing games like Zork/Adventure are from the mainframe days. But so are Hunt The Wumpus and most notably, Star Trek simulator games.
BBS games continued here, let's just think of TradeWars..

And then there's the rather "analogue" side, with electronic games such as Tennis for Two (oscilloscope) and SpaceWar (PDP-1 w/ radar screen)!

PS: Just noticed this Ti99 site has a bit of background information about Ami99.

Edit: Or to provide another example of similarities, both the BBS scene and demoscene shared their love for ANSI/PETSCII Art.

This is an artistic field, which in electronic form, was dating back to radio teletype art (RTTY Art) from early 20th century.
Which in turn had its roots in Typewriter Art .

That shows that computing, writing and communications share a common heritage.
Maybe one that's stronger than their heritage with science/math, even.
So computing always had a social component, as well, depending on how we look at it.

Edit: To the TI99/4A users and fans among of you - I've just found an interesting article called "What Ever Happened to the TI-9900 CPU? " 🙂

I've stumbled over it while visiting the TI99/4A Shrine site.