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Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
- eqvinox 8mo agoIPv6 seems broken on this website.
- Synaesthesia 8mo agoAltavista search engine is a throwback for me.
- mr_tox 8mo agowhat is this feeling? oh, yes, it's damn nostalgia
- jalev 8mo agoI've been playing freecell on it for the last hour or so
- VerifiedReports 8mo ago"For the best experience, use Chrome." That's not Windows 3.11. That kind of thing is circa 2000, and a state none of us should want the Web to return to.
- ktm5j 8mo agoIf this were a commercial project then I could understand the complaint.. but this is just a small, for-fun project and they have little motivation to put the extra effort into support for all browsers.
- userbinator 8mo agoBellard (yes, him) already had a working VM of Windows 2000 in the browser around a decade ago, with no specific "support for all browsers" (whatever that means): https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&graphic=1&w=1024&h=768 https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...
- bastawhiz 8mo agoSadly we can't all be Bellard
- anthk 8mo agoAlso, look at 8086tiny, or PCulator/XTulator. These could be ported with ease to EMSCripten and run everywhere, not just in Chrome. Chrome almost became the new IE and Google, despite it's motto, the new Microsoft. Ok, the desktop? Android rules the smartphone sales in the world, and its online services are used by millions, with far more metadata grabbing than w9x/wxp on its day and with the same propietary OSes.
- bastawhiz 8mo agoConsider: maybe it's not a matter of non-standard APIs, but bad performance. It's not simply porting to the lowest common denominator, it's making sure the code doesn't run at a snail's pace because the JIT/wasm compiler has a pathological edge case.
- VerifiedReports 8mo agoI'm not really complaining; just harking back to a shitty time that is, on some commercial sites, threatening to return. Especially as Apple finally allows Chrome on iOS, eroding the main bastion against it: Safari.
- gfody 8mo agoit's too late, we're in chrome monoculture era for a while now
- VerifiedReports 8mo agoNot on mobile, though.
- GeertB 8mo agomonochrome
- hypercube33 8mo agoYou know 3.11 was end of support 2001 and some versions were still supported to 2008 so technically it's in era.
- ranger_danger 8mo agoJust a black screen for me.
- xavortm 8mo agoLook at how fast Excel loads. Compare to modern high-end PC with it's latest version.
- pjerem 8mo agoI came to write exactly this comment. The thing runs instantly. And that's in a VM in Javascript.
- bitwize 8mo agoOffice really chugged on the PCs of the time though. We can debate whether modern Excel actually delivers enough more value than historical Excel to justify being as more resource-hungry, thus slower to load, as it is. But historical Excel appears fast on modern hardware, even in emulation, because the CPU, RAM, and permanent storage have had 30 years to evolve since it was released. Contemporary 386s and 486s would not have been that snappy.
- gerdesj 8mo agoI beg to differ. I'm 55. Let's go back to say around 1994/5. I've just got a job as the first dedicated IT bod for a pie factory near Plymouth (Devon not MA)! Win 3.11 was pretty much everywhere and was almost reliable - patching wasn't really a thing then in the MS world. By then Pentium (586) was a thing but the majority of machines were 80486, 80386s were still useful. There were also the 386/486 SX/DX and DX2 and Cyrix and so on. The planning spreadsheets were a series of Lotus 1-2-3 jobbies with a lot of manual copy and pasting and I gradually ported it to a Excel VBA job. To cut a long story short, I was running Win311 and Excel on a Pentium 75 with 16MB RAM, IDE HDD. Excel was way quicker to start than on a modern PC running Win 11 with an SSD. Yes, a lot of things took a while but I ended up with a finite capacity plan in VBA for an entire factory that took less than five minutes per run. That was for meat and dough prep, make, bake and wrap and dispatch for 150 odd finished product lines. It generated a labour plan as well and ran totally to forecast (which it also did). Pasties, sossie rolls etc are generally made to forecast - they take a while to get through the plant and have to be delivered into depot with enough code (shelf life) for the customer (store) to be able to sell them and the consumer to not be given a dose of the trots. As reality kicked in, you input the actual orders etc and it refined the plan. OK not the best tool for the job but I hope I show that a spreadsheet back in the day was more than capable of doing useful things. I've just fired up LO calc on my laptop with a SSD and it took longer than I remember old school Excel starting up or perhaps the same time.
- achairapart 8mo agoExited to dos, found Bubble Bobble in GAMES directory and started to play. And that's mostly what I used to do as a kid at the times of Windows 3.11!
- smusamashah 8mo agoCan we have icons like these again please. I started from Windows 98 and always loved the icons. They actually represented the application and purpose. These days they are more focused on looking modern. Lots of times they are not even distinguishable between each other.
- rzzzt 8mo agoC:\Windows\System32\moricons.dll is still available, you can set them on shortcuts in Properties with the "Change icon" button.
- M95D 8mo agoMoricons.dll had icons for various DOS programs like word perfect. The icons used in desktop are/were in progman.exe, shell32.dll and control.exe (IIRC, it was a long time ago).
- sillywalk 8mo agoRaymond Chen has more on this: What were the MS-DOS programs that Windows used the progman.exe stock icons for? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250506-00/?p=111149 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250506-00/?p=11... What were the intended uses of those icons in moricons.dll? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=111143 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=11...
- rzzzt 8mo agoshell32.dll is unfortunately modernized on modern versions of Windows, with very few exceptions :( the Novell tree is still there.
- owlstuffing 8mo agoIndeed! The UI in general is more intuitive compared with mod flat bs.
- canjobear 8mo agoI was expecting it to boot to DOS and then having to typing "win"
- Finnucane 8mo agoAnd then crash.
- felixfurtak 8mo agoautoexec.bat does that for you!
- genewitch 8mo agounless you hold shift after POST. True story, and keep it in your hat if you know it: I was expelled from highschool about 3 months in to my freshman year for doing this on the library computers to bypass the librarian needing to log us in, because the Mac lab printers weren't working and the report was due next period. Librarian was like "nah i'm on lunch" so i waited like 15 minutes, bypassed, printed, exited windows. She was fuming, shaking showing printed papers with "autoexec.bat" showing an edit time[1] while she "was on lunch" and i "was the only one in there". I actually got expelled from that school 3 times, twice for "hacking." [1] hold shift to get to MS-DOS without restriction, edit AUTOEXEC.BAT to comment out the "security" "software" line, reboot. remove the commented line, reboot.
- absynth 8mo agoPlenty of people would have used this purely for Cardfile. em-dosbox is a good project.
- dintech 8mo agoI loved messing around with this for a short time. Very nostalgic.
- Aardwolf 8mo agoMy only complaint is the esc button you need in some of the games, make the fullscreen go to the small display again
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoSome previous discussion: 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104531
- cyberax 8mo agoAh. Every time I look at the UI, I realize just how much the modern UI/UX degraded. We had clear colorful icons, text labels, scrollbars, clearly distinguishable checkboxes. And now we have UI that actively promotes "rebelliousness" and "being in the know".
- oliwary 8mo agoThis is super cool! Ran into an issue though, the first time it boots perfectly, after the first refresh it loads for a bit (downloads the image again instead of from cache) and then a cachebuster URL is added and loading starts over, without ever finishing. Ideally it would just load from cache on refresh.
- alexjplant 8mo agoThe long pause after "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." as the disk image downloaded aroused a dormant feeling of dread in me as I panicked and wondered why Windows wasn't loading... back in the day it meant getting yelled at for "breaking" the computer and tasked with spending the day reinstalling Windows and everybody's programs. Nostalgia tends to make things seem better than they were. Moments like this remind me how much tech has improved over the years.
- M95D 8mo agoI used a doublespace/drivespace volume for Windows. Backup was just booting from a floppy and making a copy of that file. Reinstall was "format c:", "sys a: c:", copy the volume file and dblspace.ini from backup.
- t1234s 8mo agoI forgot how good the old version of excel was
- stuart78 8mo agoVery pleased to see Abuse in there, but unfortunately it didn't load for me. I spent way too many hours in that game back in the day.
- dwd 8mo agoThe Pentium boot process brings back memories. I really would have liked to play Syndicate.
- doublerabbit 8mo agoGreat. Attempting to use this on my 2mb ADSL is exactly like loading it from floopy disk. A true nostalgic expirence.
- mvkel 8mo agoExcited for the inevitable "Windows 3.11 - 98K MRR" in pieter's X bio.
- 29athrowaway 8mo agoYou can add Visual Basic 3 and Turbo C
- dachris 8mo agoStarted the Visual Basic dev env, added a button to the form, MsgBox "Hello World", and it worked. So simple, so easy. Those were the days.
- pjmlp 8mo agoYou can still have that experience with VB.NET, C#, Delphi, FreePascal, Gambas, Xojo and C++ Builder. Instead folks go with Electron crap.
- anthk 8mo agoTCL/Tk too, albeit being far less intuitive than Lazarus+FreePascal. Altough it has far less code, so it's a draw on difficulty. The average Joe would just spend time measuring the sizes of the frames and that's it.
- pjmlp 8mo agoIn a sense yeah, but as far as I remember it never had a good UI designer.
- zabzonk 8mo agoWell, MessageBox() in the Win32 API is just a simple C function call: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-messagebox https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/... I wrote a blog about this many years ago: https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/simple-windows-dialogs-from-c-part-1/ https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/simple-windows-dial...
- dcrazy 8mo agoIt’s everything leading up to the MessageBox() call that VB makes trivial.
- katzenversteher 8mo agoI was super happy when I found OMF 2097 in the games 2 folder. That game has insanely good music.
- pjmlp 8mo agoLove the experience, and it has been a while that I haven't seen a BIOS system configuration, what a throwback.
- alt227 8mo agoI love everything except the mouse emulation, it makes it really clunky and hard to click on anything. Any way to let me just use the normal pointer in the browser instead of a javascript abstracted one?
- theun 8mo agoVery excited to see Superlogo there! As a Dutch kid I grew up with Windows 3.11 and have devoured all "Programmeren voor Kinderen" books that made me learn to love programming.
- redbell 8mo agoOh, I didn't immediately noticed that this was made by Pieter Levels! Discussion from Nov, 2024 with 160 points and 75 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104531
- cheema33 8mo agoVery impressive. Does anybody know the technical details of how this demo was put together?
- Gormo 8mo agoLooks like it's a really polished deployment of em-dosbox, i.e. DOSBox via Emscripten.
- amiga386 8mo agoI feel personally attacked. I still use that exact mousepad from 1994. It's a 32 year old mousepad.
- GeertB 8mo agoCan't help myself: whenever I see Windows 3.11, I have to compute the difference between it and Windows 3.1. So, I fire up the calculator from the Accessories folder, and compute 3.11 - 3.1. The result: 0.00. Try it! :-)
- ksec 8mo agoI think, I may be wrong Windows 3.11 was the last Window that provide instantaneous GUI response. Windows 95 was still fast by today's standard but it wasn't "instant".
- owlstuffing 8mo agoWindows 3.x did not have preemptive multitasking, apps had to yield in the message loop (cooperative multitasking). This meant that an instantaneous response was possible, but often wasn't, at all. Win95 brought true preemptive multitasking, which was a breath of fresh air.
- MisterTea 8mo agoThis is the third time today I open a demo website that tells me to use Chrome. No thanks.