Humor Random Comments Thread

[Urwumpe]

At least you can install it. There's plenty of software from the late 90's/early 2000's era that, in theory, runs just fine on modern Windows, but is tricky to install because the developer licensed a Win16 installer. IIRC, a good number of LucasArts games actually had a 16-bit launcher, which makes them even trickier.

At least I try - also from testing, the OpenRails engine seems to run faster than the original engine even just with Intel graphics.



Just want to see if I can get the old Harzquerbahn add-on running there.

 

[Artlav]

I wonder how long before the earlier Windows games would migrate into the emulation domain, like DOS did with DOSBox.

 

[Urwumpe]

I wonder how long before the earlier Windows games would migrate into the emulation domain, like DOS did with DOSBox.

Depends - Would somebody really miss earlier windows games in first place?

 

[Artlav]

Well, so far the ones people missed had been refurbished, remade, remastered or recompiled to Steam.

However, there are plenty of games most people aren't going to miss individually that are in aggregate missed by a lot of people.

 

[Linguofreak]

I wonder how long before the earlier Windows games would migrate into the emulation domain, like DOS did with DOSBox.

Well, one of the primary solutions for full Win16 software is to have Win3 running in DOSBox. The only solution that doesn't involve running actual Win3/Win9x/NTVDM at this point is Wine.

The big problem is the lack of a FOSS solution that runs Win16 well consistently (Wine is spotty on that front: some things it runs better than 32-bit Win10 NTVDM, others it chokes on), and with every passing year, more knowledge about the Win16 environment dies and staying such a project becomes harder. Despite being a kludgy, buggy product from a company I'm not fond of, I'm sad to see that happen, because Win16 was my childhood computing platform.

Considering that MS has released up through DOS 2 under the MIT license (IIRC) on their own, it might be feasible to lobby them to crowdfund an open source release of as much DOS, Win16, and NTVDM code as they have or can buy the rights to (some components were developed externally), if we could figure out who in the company to lobby.

Failing that, I've mused at times about writing something called "Free.X11" (punning "Free", "Windows 3.x", "X11", and "Windows 3.11") which would include an open-source Win16 implementation that would run on top of FreeDOS or DOSBox, an X11 client implementation whose primary purpose would be to integrate Win16 applications seamlessly with the local desktop when running DOSBox on *nix, and maybe an X11 server implementation. But I don't have anything close to the knowledge to pull that off myself, and the manpower requirements would probably be more than just me even if I did.

For Win32 games with Win16 installers/launchers, I think most of those have been repackaged to use Steam as their installer/launcher, or else have been repackaged as fully Win32 by GOG.

 

[Artlav]

and the manpower requirements would probably be more than just me even if I did

That sounds a lot harder than porting a single DOS game.
I actually did the latter, with SimEarth, which involved fusing it with an 80186 emulator, making a crude decompiler and rewriting about 10% of it's code, parts that handled all the interactions with the external world - graphics, files, input, sound, resources, memory, FPU, and so on.
It was a droning madness that i had to forcibly terminate to avoid sinking years into it (initially i wanted to decompile and rewrite 100% of the game).

Making an entire rewrite of an API layer would be 10x worse, i suspect.

 

[Linguofreak]

That sounds a lot harder than porting a single DOS game.
I actually did the latter, with SimEarth, which involved fusing it with an 80186 emulator, making a crude decompiler and rewriting about 10% of it's code, parts that handled all the interactions with the external world - graphics, files, input, sound, resources, memory, FPU, and so on.
It was a droning madness that i had to forcibly terminate to avoid sinking years into it (initially i wanted to decompile and rewrite 100% of the game).

Making an entire rewrite of an API layer would be 10x worse, i suspect.

I don't think it would be *that* bad: most of the API was publicly available, so there would be no need to reverse-engineer that part, just to reimplement it, and an open-source example implementation (the 16-bit part of Wine) exists for *nix. The parts of the API that weren't public I think have already been clean-room reverse engineered, and would only affect compatibility with Microsoft products anyways (because only Microsoft had access to that part of the API). Heck, you might just take an existing FOSS DOS extender and write a POSIX layer into it, then just run Wine on top of that (OTOH it would probably require some work on Wine16 to improve its fidelity with certain applications, but on the third hand, some of those problems might actually be rooted in Wine16 not actually having DOS running under it).

But that's not to say that the "ask MS to open source Win16" route might not actually be a better use of effort.

 

[Urwumpe]

One part of the problem is: There are not many Windows 3.11 games around. And not much more games based on the 16-bit API of windows.

And those had really not been very popular - Windows 3.11 was really bad in multimedia.

 

[jedidia]

And those had really not been very popular - Windows 3.11 was really bad in multimedia.

Well, it was really just a UI for an OS that was bad at multimedia (i.e. didn't provide any interfaces for it at all out of the box), so that's not very astonishing... :shifty:

 

[Linguofreak]

One part of the problem is: There are not many Windows 3.11 games around. And not much more games based on the 16-bit API of windows.

And those had really not been very popular - Windows 3.11 was really bad in multimedia.

There weren't a lot of envelope-pushing games for Win16, but there were a number of gems with lower performance requirements. The original release of Civilization 2 was for Win16, for example. Of course, for that there were later Win32 versions, the Civilization series has continued into the modern day, and Civ2 was cloned in FreeCiv, so it's not really one of the titles that's going to be lost to history because there isn't a robust Win16 emulation platform around, but it does demonstrate that the Win16 gaming scene was not entirely barren.

 

[Urwumpe]

There weren't a lot of envelope-pushing games for Win16, but there were a number of gems with lower performance requirements. The original release of Civilization 2 was for Win16, for example. Of course, for that there were later Win32 versions, the Civilization series has continued into the modern day, and Civ2 was cloned in FreeCiv, so it's not really one of the titles that's going to be lost to history because there isn't a robust Win16 emulation platform around, but it does demonstrate that the Win16 gaming scene was not entirely barren.

Never doubted that. But the Win16 gaming scene was never a highlight. Many hated the API for its limitations and poor design. Whoever was interested in his own games ported them to the Win32 API as soon as it was available.

 

[Linguofreak]

1000 evangelists is a Billy Kilograham.

 

[Linguofreak]

Can you imagine what it would be like if a bronze age fisherman were transported to our time, and you were giving him a tour?

*Standing off the departure end of a runway at a large airport.
*747 takes off and flies overhead.
Bronze ager: WTF is *THAT*!!!!
You: It's a flying ship. We do that these days.
Bronze ager: That's a enormous ship!
You: Meh, it's hard to get things to fly, so it's actually fairly tiny compared to a floating ship...
Bronze ager: HOW BIG ARE YOUR FLOATING SHIPS???!!!
*Bronze ager faints.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

<Bronze ager regains consciousness>


Well, if it is any consolation, our spaceships are still rather small.


<Bronze ager faints again>

 

[Linguofreak]

<Bronze ager faints again>

Well, before he can faint again, you're going to need to actually tell him what "space" is.

 

[Notebook]

Fun and games at Heathrow today as a storm passes through:

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-engl...s-to-land-in-strong-winds-at-heathrow-airport

Unless you were on it of course.

 

[Linguofreak]

I assume the abort was because they came down so far off centerline? Did anyone catch anything other than that?

 

[tl8]

I assume the abort was because they came down so far off centerline? Did anyone catch anything other than that?

Wasn't too far from the touch down point. Did plant it too.


Centreline didn't look that bad. Maybe the reverse's didn't deploy?

 

[Urwumpe]

Can you imagine what it would be like if a bronze age fisherman were transported to our time, and you were giving him a tour?

*Standing off the departure end of a runway at a large airport.
*747 takes off and flies overhead.
Bronze ager: WTF is *THAT*!!!!
You: It's a flying ship. We do that these days.
Bronze ager: That's a enormous ship!
You: Meh, it's hard to get things to fly, so it's actually fairly tiny compared to a floating ship...
Bronze ager: HOW BIG ARE YOUR FLOATING SHIPS???!!!
*Bronze ager faints.

Depending on from where you took him, explaining some other changes might be easier. "Oh, we still celebrate Jul. We just call it Christmas and don't sacrifice human slaves anymore. Just give it a chance."

"That is beer. Be careful with it, its a lot stronger than you are used to. But there is also alcohol-free beer, that you can consume as usual."

Still, I would not take him to a Supermarkt too soon. It must be mind-blowing to see so much food in one place and that for so cheap. I just need to work for 20 minutes a day to earn the food that I need for buying all food I consume that day.

And I wonder how it would be like coming from the bronze age middle east and realizing not too much has actually changed in Mesopotamia. The many AK-47s might be a bit weird at first, but that just a better version of a bow...

 

[jedidia]

Finding a bug that causes a permanent off-by-one error in billable metrics is not great for your mental health. I'm on the fast track to becoming paranoid now... :shifty: At least the code wasn't in production yet.