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Superbar95 - A modern taskbar for a vintage OS

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First post, by NikolaiX

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Hi everyone! I've spent the last few months doing something probably ill-advised: building a modern, customisable taskbar for Windows 95 using Visual C++ 6.0.

It's called *Superbar 95*.

Key Features:

  • Centered taskbar and Windows 11 style Start Menu, with the ability to switch to a more classic start menu.
  • App pinning and grouping.
  • Native Visual Studio 6 codebase (no .NET, no modern wrappers).
  • High performance - runs comfortably on a 486.

I'd love some feedback from fellow legacy hardware users!

Github repo can be found here: https://github.com/NikolaiX/Superbar95

Reply 1 of 7, by PCGamingTimeMachine

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This looks amazing! I'll test it out and let you how it works on my Win98 PC

Reply 2 of 7, by PCGamingTimeMachine

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Works very well for me so far. Good stuff! One feature request - The icon names in the Win11 style menu can't be renamed as of now. Possible to add a feature down the line where they can be renamed? e.g. renaming "Mspaint" to "Paint", etc.

Reply 4 of 7, by Cyberdyne

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Can it be converted to 16bit?

I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.
PS. If I upload RAR, it is a 16-bit DOS RAR Version 2.50.

Reply 5 of 7, by NikolaiX

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PCGamingTimeMachine wrote on 2026-04-06, 09:40:

Works very well for me so far. Good stuff! One feature request - The icon names in the Win11 style menu can't be renamed as of now. Possible to add a feature down the line where they can be renamed? e.g. renaming "Mspaint" to "Paint", etc.

Thanks for trying it out! I'll see if I can improve how the titles display for these apps. The taskbar already makes tweaks to ensure dos apps show the correct name, so it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to do something similar in the start menu.

Reply 6 of 7, by NikolaiX

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Cyberdyne wrote on 2026-04-06, 13:38:

Can it be converted to 16bit?

I haven't considered the idea. Are you thinking of running this in Windows 3.1?

Reply 7 of 7, by PCGamingTimeMachine

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I think another very neat spinoff of your program could be a Win 7-style search box in the start menu, or a Win10-style search box on the taskbar that one can use just to search through whatever is present in the start menu. Basically the same search implementation of the search box as you have currently in the Win11 style start menu in current Superbar95.

I say this because there are many people who don't really like the Windows 11 UI. I can definitely appreciate this as a very cool project with a lot of potential, but ngl I also am not a huge fan of Windows 11 UI due to its restrictive nature. The search box in either the start menu or the taskbar would be a seriously good QoL feature - but that's just my take. I'm not sure how easy or hard this would be to implement - you know better

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