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My (possibly faulty) memory of win32s is that it was came out before Windows 95, and that it would not run most of the programs that were later released for Win
by wryun 9y ago
My (possibly faulty) memory of win32s is that it was came out before Windows 95, and that it would not run most of the programs that were later released for Windows 95. I'd call it a 'Win32 API for Windows 3.1' rather than a compatibility environment for Windows 3.1.
- yuhong 9y agoYea, old anti-trust exhibits mentioned so-called 32-bit Windows extenders, which had many limitations compared to say OS/2 2.0. For example, I think all Win32s apps ran in a single global address space, not to mention the lack of multi-threading etc.
- ashleyn 9y agoCorrect. Win32s was a brief stopgap between home/low-cost user support for 32-bit APIs and the release of Windows 95.
- stormbrew 9y agoWhile this was part of it, I think the main reason it existed was more for smaller developers who couldn't use/afford windows NT (at the time really really expensive) a win32 development environment before win95 came out so there'd be more software (of the shareware variety) for it when it came out.
- digi_owl 9y agoYep, i recall trying to get a game demo going that required Win32s and WinG installed. Ended up taking up so much of the old HDD that i barely could get the game going, and it crawled.
- muro 9y agoSimilar here - I think Battle Isle 3 was annoying being built on that api
- lathiat 9y agoI remember running Win32s with a shell that emulated the look of Windows 95 on 3.11. My 486 has some kind of Boot sector overwrite prompt to protect against viruses but it displayed on screen in text over the graphical UI of the Win95 installer and that froze the machine and I couldn’t continue.
- beached_whale 9y agoWindows 3.11 for workgroups had the win32 subsystem