[mmastrac]

This is an awesome project. I highly recommend reading through his series on Medium (eg https://medium.com/@CantabileApp/implementing-window-messagi...)

That being said, I think he is overestimating the market that would pay for this. This seems like it could attract at least a small community as an open source project, however. Unfortunately effort in development is not always rewarded with monetary gain.

Perhaps he should license it as GPL3 and offer commercial licenses? He may find some customers in software houses that are still selling Win16 software.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Also, Wine already exists. If Wine is ported to run on Windows, this project is redundant, I'd assume?

(In fact, it strikes me now that if you're on Windows 10, you could probably run Wine on the WSL.)

[mmastrac]

His approach is a bit different as he is shimming 16 bit APIs to their 64-bit equivalent. Wine reimplemented them to run on top of a POSIX environment.

His approach will result in higher fidelity for apps as they are basically running on Win64, just with a 16-bit virtual machine driving it.

Wine apps running on Windows would likely feel non-native as the UI components are reimplemented from scratch.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Well, the UI components in Wine feel like Windows, just not like Windows 10.

[leonatan]

Windows 98 perhaps. 2000 if generous.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Yes, they have the “Windows Classic” look and feel.

[JonathonW]

Wine actually has (mostly) functional theming support-- point Wine to a .msstyles theme DLL and it'll draw themed controls (rather than the Windows Classic style default).

They just don't ship a theme with Wine; understandable for licensing reasons (they can't distribute Microsoft's designs), but it means that Wine looks like Windows 2000 out of the box.

[userbinator]

I find it a bit amusing that were they to "update" their look to that of the flat Windows 8+ UI, it would probably entail the removal of a lot of code.

...and yet even on a 25MHz 386, no one complained about the slow drawing speed of the "fancy" 3D buttons in Win3.x.

[amyjess]

16-bit applications can't run in long mode (i.e. a 64-bit OS), so you'll need a 32-bit OS to run these apps in WINE. WINE is just a shim and a library reimplementation, not an emulator, so it just passes the instructions on to the CPU, and you're limited by what the CPU can do.

Hmm... I wonder if you can run 16-bit applications in WINE on a 32-bit VirtualBox VM running on a 64-bit Linux system. That sounds like overkill, though. Might as well just use PCem or DOSbox, depending on your use case (PCem: cycle-accurate emulation of a whole PC, including specific hardware models and running any OS a real PC could; DOSbox: playing some old games for fun).

TBH, I'm not sure what win3mu's point is, either: it probably won't be open-source, and right now the only reason to not use PCem or DOSbox is if you don't own a legitimate copy of Win3.1 and you're not willing to pirate it. An open-source clone of Windows 3.1 that can run any Win16 program in long mode (by interpreting the instructions like an actual emulator) would be a great idea, but this isn't it.

[chungy]

64-bit Wine has been capable of running Win16 apps for years. It does require the Win16 app to be fully protected mode, but it works fine.

[Aloha]

Yes, you can.

[scrollaway]

Wine already does run on Windows (not well), no WSL needed. Some users already use it to play old games that only run on Win 98 for example.

[lnternet]

Source?

(Are you referring to the use of software like Colinux and Andlinux? Those only worked on 32-bit systems last time I checked...)

[scrollaway]

I haven't been involved with Wine in a long time but the Wine test suite itself is regularly run on Windows:

https://test.winehq.org/data/

Here's an admittedly very old article by Dan Kegel on how to compile it on Windows: http://www.kegel.com/wine/wow.html

But yeah, I don't think it's explicitly supported since it's not their target market :) Codeweavers' focus is running Windows apps on Mac and Linux (Crossover - go support them! https://www.codeweavers.com/)

Edit: It looks like they completely dropped support for it as I can't find any of the old articles anymore; Seems it only supports mingw setup now. https://wiki.winehq.org/Cygwin_and_More

[voltagex_]

What's the difference between Wine, Crossover and PlayOnLinux?

[scrollaway]

Crossover is a commercial version of Wine which includes a bunch of extra hacks for popular applications. It comes with support. It's how the Wine project pays salaries.

PlayOnLinux is a Wine wrapper which has preset configurations (best known working wine version and dll overrides) for a ton of popular games/software. Think of it like a virtualenv on steroids.

[rhabarba]

Win3mu seems to be an emulator, Wine does not.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Wine is an emulator if you're running 16-bit apps.

[rasz_pl]

One source of revenue might be GOG? Shipping Windows 3.11 wrapped in dosbox is impractical :). https://www.gog.com/forum/general/16bit_era_windows_31_mpc_c...