10 ms·
Discord client that works on Win95*, Win98 and above
- Tiberium 2y ago* from the recent commit "V1.07 works on Win95. But you have to install a different LibCrypto, LibSSL, and also install the WinSock2 update." Download for the Win95 version: https://github.com/DiscordMessenger/dm/releases/tag/v1.07a https://github.com/DiscordMessenger/dm/releases/tag/v1.07a
- zxvkhkxvdvbdxz 2y agoCool project, but it is missing central features of Discord such as voice and screen sharing.
- johnisgood 2y agoI mean, it is for Win95 and Win98.
- mmmlinux 2y agoWhat do you mean my 250mhz processor cant handle voice chat and screen sharing?
- johnisgood 2y agoWhat I mean is, they are the potential limitations: 1. Modern VoIP applications are incompatible with Windows 95/98 2. Hardware availability 3. Networking issues 4. Driver support 5. Obsolete Protocols 6. Performance limitations (indeed, modern audio codecs may be an issue, incl. Opus and AAC) A 250 MHz processor can handle basic voice chat but with significant limitations, and there is much more to it when it comes to practice... so while technically a 250 MHz processor might (for historical experimentation or nostalgia), in reality it is not practical for functional use today.
- userbinator 2y agoA Pentium 233MMX is capable of DVD playback, so I think voice chat is definitely possible. I've worked on VoIP phones that had slower CPUs and they handled a SIP stack just fine. A Pentium III 733MHz with 128MB RAM running Win98 works fine for (low-res) video chat. Been there, done that.
- johnisgood 2y agoI know, but it is still not practical or suitable for functional use. Just to help you understand what I mean: obtaining such a CPU (with the rest of the compatible hardware) and obtain & install Windows 98 is not as straightforward these days. Sure it may be for me because I still have my old hardware, but still. And by the way (for another PC) I had to install Windows 11 because I had Windows 7 and all my programs stopped supporting it. Not practical either, sadly. I was forced to install Windows 11.
- ryao 2y agoInstall a Linux distribution and install your software in Wine.
- johnisgood 2y agoI do use Linux (mainly).
- jasongill 2y ago> A Pentium 233MMX is capable of DVD playback No they aren't. DVD playback on early systems was hardware based using an MPEG2 decoder (often included on the sound card that came packed in with the DVD drive, or on some video cards or dedicated MPEG decoder cards) Software playback of DVD's on a Pentium MMX at 233mhz is going to be limited to single digit framerates, especially if you are trying to decode Dolby Digital or DTS audio as well
- ryao 2y agoI recall MSN Messenger supporting phone calls during the Windows 98 days. There should be no fundamental reason why it could not handle VoIP.
- HeckFeck 2y agoThe modern protocols? Likely not, but it was absolutely possible back then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting NetMeeting even used an open ITU protocol that could voice call other clients! The 90s were a different time.
- RestartKernel 2y agoIt'd be interesting to see this project develop further, if only to get WebRTC running on Win95 (iirc).
- extraduder_ire 2y agoAccording to the author's bluesky posts, there's a few features missing from Win32s compared to regular Win32 that prevent this from being ported even further back to windows 3.1 easily.
- thebeardisred 2y agoHow long until they get slapped with a trademark claim?
- thatguy0900 2y agoRipcord is a third party discord client that's been around for quite a while, as far as I'm aware they haven't run into any trouble. And they actually might get used as opposed to someone seriously trying to run discord on windows 95
- DoctorOW 2y agoI think the root of the problem in this one is that it's named "Discord Messenger", Ripcord is reminiscent but not confusing.
- thatguy0900 2y agoThat's fair
- bathwaterpizza 2y agoSame for Vencord/Vesktop
- _--__--__ 2y agoSpeaking as a ripcord user, it helps your unofficial client avoid being blocked when you don't update for years and fall behind on feature parity (though I personally don't miss most any of said features)
- kevingadd 2y agoWhy do you think Ripcord stopped getting updated? :)
- jeffwask 2y agoI don't think Discord cares as long as their backend still gets to harvest all the data.
- userbinator 2y agoSomeone needs to get around to doing this for Microsoft Teams.
- fishgoesblub 2y agoYou'd need to somehow get it to work on Windows 10/11 first.
- SecretDreams 2y agoI'm not sure one person has that much self loathing.
- rfw300 2y agoThat's a morally questionable action—it might encourage some businesses to stay on Windows 98 even longer. And if that weren't bad enough already, the employees would also have to use Teams!
- amlib 2y agoJoke's on you, I think nowadays it's more enjoyable to use windows 98/95 compared to 10/11. You may have to forego an always connected workflow but i guess that's good for your mental health too :)
- labster 2y agoBack then they had the technology to build a solitaire program without advertising, now sadly lost to the mists of time.
- somenameforme 2y agoLol wtf. I just ran Solitaire (on Win10) for the first time. I was greeted by a several second loading screen, a prompt telling me to login to something or another so I can "Level Up" and gain XP rewards, then an error message because it failed to login to XBox Live that cycled through multiple times as I cancelled out, before finally allowing me the privilege of playing as a guest on my own computer. And then I get a splash page filled with advertising crap of other products, which then gives me more errors when I tried to 'x' out of it. What an ungodly abomination that is an utterly appropriate living metaphor for what "modern" OSs have turned into. I can't wait until everything also has "AI" shoved into it. It'll be great.
- umajho 2y ago[dead]
- gigel82 2y agoJust beautiful. 64Mb of RAM and snappy due to native UI framework use. Compare it to the sluggish 1.2Gb of RAM that Teams uses (when not in a video call).
- yellowapple 2y agoEven 64MB is a lot of RAM for a typical Windows 9x machine. Still good progress, though.
- p0w3n3d 2y agoevery Proton based app tends to use min. 1GB of RAM. That's scary
- HeckFeck 2y agoMSN messenger would fit in well under 2MB back in the day. As we go up, we go down.
- wiradikusuma 2y agoMaybe it's just my laptops (MacBook Air and Pro). But every time I open it, it's always "updating" (plugins?) before I can use it. Opening it in the browser is much faster.
- extraduder_ire 2y agoOne of the advantages of running programs like this in the browser is that you download a fresh (with caching) version every time you reload the page.
- MortyWaves 2y agoDesktop apps are in the best place to silently download and install updates. This can be with a schedule via OS, or some background service that is always running even if the main application isn't. This has worked very well for Chrome for a very long time, the only time it doesn't is for people like me that restart the computer only every couple of weeks. Discord could have a similar model but choose not to for some reason.
- thomastjeffery 2y agoRebooting is not necessary unless you have updated the kernel. Microsoft has generated billions of hours of bullshit labor pretending otherwise.
- Mashimo 2y agoIf you only open it every few days / weeks it will download the latest version, as they push regularly. If you open it every day and still get updates there might be something wrong.
- yellowapple 2y agoOf course there's something wrong: you're using Discord :)
- grishka 2y agoIt surprises me that they copied the suboptimal tablet-like UI layout of the official client. It's gotta be an MDI app with each chat in a separate window :)
- mrweasel 2y agoMy suggestion would have been a tab for each chat, but you're right, should be a separate window, to allow tabbing between them.
- grishka 2y agoTabbed chat windows are a newer invention than the 90s. Late-00s messaging apps all had the same, rather convenient, arrangement: a tall window with the contact/conversation list, and a tabbed window with your current conversations. Things like profiles and settings would also open in separate windows. But yeah that's my ideal desktop chat app UI tbh. It's a shame that out of the current ones, only Steam and Battle.net are like that, and those aren't even messaging apps, they're game launchers with social functionality as an extra.
- Shorel 2y agoI don't remember Pirch or mIRC being like that.
- perching_aix 2y agoWhat do you find "suboptimal" and "tablet-like" about it?
- omoikane 2y ago> You might be able to use Mingw-w64, but you might run into trouble running the final product on anything newer than XP I rarely see a maximum system requirement.
- bmacho 2y agoIt was quite common on Linux before docker
- liamkearney 2y agoNot exactly the problem docker solves…
- unosama 2y agoWelcome to the brave new world where modern OSes only get worse
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoThere are old games which tied system state directly to computational power. A buddy recently tried to boot up some childhood relic (Descent 1?) and said pressing forward made you move at light speed and immediately crash into a wall. So, there is software with implicit maximums.
- thomastjeffery 2y agoThis is why dosbox sets the virtual cpu clock.
- 77pt77 2y agoVery common in old software.
- raphman 2y agoJust a gentle warning: try out alternative Discord clients with a non-important account first. A few years ago, I used ripcord¹ and got automatically banned by Discord - probably because I had started the original Discord client on the same computer, and this triggered some heuristics. Discord's first-level support was not willing to reinstate my account, and I had to² track down their head of security on Twitter to get my account reinstated. ¹) https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/, no new releases since 2021 ²) I'd not generally suggest this approach. However, since COVID we have been using Discord a lot for informal communication with our students. Losing access to a dozen course servers mid-semester was a huge problem for me.
- yellowapple 2y agoThe same thing happened to me with Telegram years ago, when I logged into my account using the Haiku port of Telegram's desktop client.
- reddalo 2y agoTelegram allows third-party clients however
- taurknaut 2y agoWhat incentive do they have to control the client? Does discord have ads?
- chrisldgk 2y agoNo third party ads like you might be thinking, but a lot of in-app upsells for discord nitro (their pro tier), server boosts, custom emotes and stuff like that. Their monetization scheme is very twitch-like, I’d not be surprised if they don’t like you using third party clients that don’t shove all of that in your face.
- idle_zealot 2y agoAnd yet Twitch seems to allow BTT, which adds custom emotes and such that a user would normally need to pay for.
- jeroenhd 2y agoTime to stuff this into BoxedWine (https://www.boxedwine.org/ https://www.boxedwine.org/) and we'll finally have a fast, lightweight chat client for Discord!
- dzdt 2y agoAs I get older (and watch my parents get much older) I see a desire for a completely stable computer system that continues to work exactly the same way for timescales of decades. Currently this is impossible in the Windows or Mac ecosystems -- the operating system will go out of support, and force an upgrade, and then things will work differently. And maybe the upgrade requires new hardware, and then there is no way to bring your old programs across and hard to bring all your data across and then everything is different. Maybe its possible in the linux ecosystem, though there sure are a lot of people saying you have to stay on the update treadmill or else you'll get eaten by the script kiddies and their internet worms. Maybe there is an approach using something like BoxedWine, to have a stable user-facing system that can be 100% ported to new hardware or underlying OS?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- alanbernstein 2y agoAs I get older, I accept that nothing humans make can last without maintenance, and that for computer systems in our growth economy, that maintenance has to be equivalent to change. It sucks, but the repeated aggravation of broken expectations is worse.
- userbinator 2y agothe operating system will go out of support That doesn't mean it stops working, and I know there are plenty of communities providing unofficial support for old Windows and even DOS. The situation with Mac may be similar but smaller, just due to relative popularity.
- timw4mail 2y ago
- notachatbot123 2y agoIt looks so snappy and efficient
- EmilyHughes 2y agoI miss these kind of applications. Nowadays everything is flat tons of wasted space, unresponsive and eats 300mb ram because it runs on electron. Just compare windows 11 task manager to windows 2000 task manager.
- 0x0 2y agoLooks like the security/integrity of SSL isn't taken too seriously as the build recommends to use a hex editor to replace "_strtoi64" and "_strtoui64" with "functions likely to return 0 such as iswxdigit" in order to successfully link OpenSSL on windows 2000 and earlier. Unclear what impact such a hack would have on the integrity of the crypto operations performed by OpenSSL?
- YPPH 2y agoIt's unlikely people running applications on an operating system that stopped publishing updates over 20 years ago care very much about that.
- Almondsetat 2y agoOpen protocols are eternal. Proprietary garbage lasts as long as the company does.
- p0w3n3d 2y agoSo many good memories when seeing such design... I wonder why things got so complicated nowadays
- Pavilion2095 2y agoThat's a fun project. But I wonder: is it a good idea to connect to the internet from these old systems?
- rschiavone 2y agoThat's the beauty about fun projects. They don't have to be good ideas.
- bilekas 2y agoAbsolutely not.. It is fun to watch what happens though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssTIx0qm2to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssTIx0qm2to
- diggan 2y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but the conclusion from that video seems to be that it's OK to connect Win98 to the internet in 2024, as nothing really happened? I expected the installation to be infected very quickly, but seems it just got a bunch of port scans and not much more than that.
- bilekas 2y agoI was expecting it to be worse to be honest, but thinking rationally about it, how many people would be targeting win9x these days ? Security by 'obsolete' !
- jabroni_salad 2y agoFor awhile mirai botnet was able to infect anything using upnp and a default credential within 20 minutes of it being connected. These days ISPs are better about shutting that kind of thing down. They monitor for botnet activity in their networks and their modem/router gateway combo devices are a lot more robust than they were in the 00's. It is also more acceptable now than it was to ship routers with upnp turned off by default, which helps A LOT.
- 2y ago
- amelius 2y agoIf you use [1] you can run it on Windows 3.1. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42959775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42959775
- anthk 2y agoCool, but Bitlbee can proxy any IRC client (even for DOS and Windows) against some server and use your accounts (even Mastodon) over IRC. https://bitlbee.org https://bitlbee.org
- nottorp 2y agoMinimum system requirements: 64 Mb RAM. Hear that, official Discord? --- Now, considering this project will be hunted down and DMCA-ed or C&D-ed soon, has the original author considered separating the generic messenger UI code from the transport code to make the codebase usable for less ... jealous ... services?
- forgotpwd16 2y agoGot curious and checked. A Discord tab used ~500MBs. Other big sites (YT, FB, etc) were also at hundreds of MBs. Web bloat is real.
- nottorp 2y agoActually Discord - the standalone "application" - has improved at some point. It used to go up to multiple gigabytes (i caught it at over 4 at some point) if you left the meme channel displayed for weeks. I'm guessing it used to keep all those animated gifs uncompressed in memory. I does seem more reasonable now. For a javascript "application" at least. > displayed for weeks I'm guessing that since Discord is a gamer oriented application all their devs are used to restarting their Windows PCs daily and don't realize that you can leave other operating systems running for months* without any trouble. * or years if you don't apply core os updates.
- DrillShopper 2y agolibpurple plugin would be amazing
- kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 2y agoSomewhat unrelated, but it's crazy to see how durable Windows APIs are. I, for unrelated reasons, last month, opened Guitar Pro 4, which had been laying around in my warez folder (copied many tines accross hard drives) since I pirated it circa 2004 as a teenager, and it worked perfectly in my machine running windows 11. Even though I love Linux, that doesn't happen over there, right?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoDefinitely not. I have a few legitimately purchased Linux releases from GOG that fail to launch on a modern distribution. Have to use the Windows build plus Wine.
- trinix912 2y agoYou can actually take some Windows 1.0/2.0 programs, run them on 32-bit Windows 11 and they work! The code structure of Win32 programs is still quite similar to the 16-bit era apart from removing archaisms like the Pascal call convention and far pointers. And when you move to the 98/2000 era, the APIs have really changed very little to this day.
- k_roy 2y agoI used to love cordless. I could be on an old Sparc machine or even DOS on a 486 and access Discord. Unfortunately the only thing alternative clients for are good for now is getting banned.
- stiltzkin 2y ago[dead]
- liendolucas 2y agoI still don't get why so many channels that should probably be on IRC moved to Discord. Yesterday I tried to share the output of an strace and apparently I have to pay to emit more than 2000 characters. Login to Discord is something that shocks me: every single time I'm told that I'm logging in from a new computer (wrong). Confim I'm human. Then need to check my email. Confirm. And relogin. This at least to me happens every single time. Reported to Discord obviously in vain. Never experienced such a login disaster in my life. What is wrong with IRC and mailing lists that everyone jumped to Discord? Since I have started to use Discord couldn't find a single good thing about it.
- DrillShopper 2y agoThis feels like a generational thing, tbqh. One of the reasons people trumpet for moving to Discord is "it keeps the message history!!!!!!!" which would be nice if 1) Discord's search wasn't a wet bag of cat ass, 2) if anybody _bothered_ to search for their question first (tale as old as time / song as old as rhyme / RTFM n00b), and 3) their platform wasn't moderated by and largely used of groomers. It's not like you can't log IRC channel chat and make it available for search and BONUS, assuming Google doesn't replace everything with AI, it's easily discoverable through Google or other search engines once they get crawled.
- alberth 2y ago> What is wrong with IRC and mailing lists that everyone jumped to... Why did forums emerge ... like HN or Reddit. Lots of technologies/platforms accomplish the same end goal. It's more about where have people gathered (network effects) and valuable information shared. (Not many people are on IRC these days, and as a result - less valuable information can be found there)
- glompers 2y agoI do regret the jump from desktop computing to mobile, but mIRC for example didn't jump while Discord, Meta, and the other advertiser-pleasers went in mobile-first. mIRC for instance: Linux - use Wine MacOS - run mIRC inside a Windows emulator, with no plans to change that, although it is compatible with other Mac-ready IRC clients that you can use to talk to the same people Similar situation for Android and iOS compatibility Source: https://www.mirc.com/mac.html https://www.mirc.com/mac.html