/vr/ - Retro Games

Microsoft Windows Entertainment Packs 1-4 > *

>>4543468
It's a weirdly dead era of games. Most of the good DOS games, you have to quit out of Windows to play anyway. The only memorable games were 16-bit Sim-stuff (SimEarth I remember fondly, a very odd "game" though) and Microsoft games (SkiFree, Chips Challenge).

>>4543516
>The only memorable games were 16-bit Sim-stuff (SimEarth I remember fondly, a very odd "game" though) and Microsoft games (SkiFree, Chips Challenge)

What is Myst, Civ2, Robert E. Lee: Civil War General, Gazillionaire, The Incredible Machine, etc, etc.

>>4543519
Wasn't Civ2 Win95 already?

>>4543519
>What [are] Myst, Civ2, Robert E. Lee: Civil War General
Games that I think of as part of the windows 95 era.
>What is Gazillionaire
A DOS game
>What is The Incredible Machine
In the same category as "sim-" games, don't you think? There's also stuff like those laser and mirrors games, forget what they're called.

>>4543468
Chip's Challenge.

>>4543519
>>4543549
And Chip's Challenge was itself a port from the Atari Lynx.

>>4543532
The original is a Windows 3.x game.

I remember it being the UI I would immediately quit to DOS almost as soon as it booted up.
Sometimes I played FreeCell.

>>4543538
>What is Gazillionaire
>A DOS game

http://www.mobygames.com/game/win3x/gazillionaire

Nope. Not a DOS game.

>>4543538
>Games that I think of as part of the windows 95 era

Irregardless of what you personally think, they are Windows 3.x games and I have actually even seen them running on real Windows 3.x

Exile 1, 2 and 3 are some of the finest RPGs ever made.

>>4543538
didn't Myst come out in 1993? that's long before Windows 95.

>>4543602
The original Mac version, they didn't put it on the PC until 1995.

Do C&C and Red Alert count? I know they are more Win 95 era but they also run in DOS.

>>4543652
If they're not Windows 3.x games, they're not Windows 3.x games.

actually just learned about running windows 3.1 through dosbox, tons of cool shit that has been posted already - castle of the winds and the microsoft entertainment packs, however i have more:

Xargon
Jill of the Jungle
X Com
Pirates Plunder
Blake Stone
Darksun
Dungeon Hack
Eye of the Beholder
Grandest Fleet
Return to Zork
Stronghold

thats just off the top of my head, but all great games, ESPECIALLY Darksun

>>4543720

All of those are pure DOS games.

>>4543730
perhaps not, but all games of around that era - pirates plunder, at least, i suppose is a windows 3.1 game... but still good times

>>4543730
That is true. Also why does Eye of the Beholder (a 1991 game) still support 8086 and CGA?

>>4543737
(this guy again) to be fair the thread was regarding windows 3.X, not DOS specifically

Don't forget this one.

>>4543747
I'm sure he wants to play a game for 5 year olds just because you personally happened to play it when you were 5 years old.

>>4543756
My brother used to play Adi Jr. It's weird because I can't find any info about the Windows version online, just the Amiga one.

>>4543759
This came out in 1994? And yet they still insisted on coding it for the almost ten year old A500 instead of the AGA line.

>>4543762
I don't think this one was even sold in the US.

>>4543772
>Amiga release from 1994
>US
No, you tell me.

>>4543762
i wish they did more AGA stuff, believe me. not my fault software houses were dumb as rocks and thought they needed to support OCS because on paper it had a bigger user base.

>>4543772
The Amiga version no but Adi Jr. did exist for Windows 3.x and we used to have it, but I can't find any info about the game online or even a screenshot.

Millennium Auction was an interesting "Win3 only" game - for a while
You bid on famous art and various weird shit, hoping it goes up in value if you win

Not a lot of "big" Win3 only games
Most were DOS/Win3 or Win3/Win95

Many of the games aimed at kids were great, even for super mature adults like us

Why were there so few Windows 3.x games? Most of them which I know were edutainment. There were HEAPS of those.

There was this open world Donald Duck game where you completed task around town to earn enough money to rebuild the jungle gym. Way better than a Putt Putt game.

>>4543743
wan't Windows 3.1 just a GUI placed on top of the MS-DOS command prompt?

>>4544258
>Why were there so few Windows 3.x games?
There were lots of them, although DOS was still the standard for "serious" gaming at that time.
>Most of them which I know were edutainment. There were HEAPS of those.
Because they were all Mac ports.

Inner Space
Earthsiege 2

DOS allowed unrestricted access to the hardware, 100% CPU use, and full 32-bit protected mode instead of the 16/32-bit hackery on Windows 3.x.

One of the big deficiencies with Windows 3.x for gaming is that it used concurrent multitasking which means that all processes get an equal amount of CPU time, while on Windows 9x and up preemptive multitasking is used, so that a game can monopolize most of the CPU while background processes sit idle.

>>4544302
It is, but so is Windows 9x for that matter.

>>4544258
Windows 3.x didn't provide anything valuable compared to DOS to most games. If your game needed GUI and window management, well, maybe it made sense to use something called WINDOWS. Casual games did benefit from being a native application that can be switched to and from at any time. Did games need protected mode multitasking? It's hard to imagine why would anyone use that way before multiprocessor systems came home. So, you were going to do everything manually anyway and bring your own libraries with you, and there was no point in coexisting with another complex piece of software wasting memory and cycles that user won't even actively use.

Imagine that you decided to be hip and make a Windows game. You would then implement a suitable graphical library, as in DOS, because Windows APIs are either absent or primitive, but that's not all. You would need to satisfy all the Windows assumptions about well behaving Windows executables, and interoperate with another complex toolkit you don't even need: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd145127(v=vs.85).aspx No wonder people hadn't cared about Windows well-being for quite some time until Windows started to enforce its authority.

>>4544302
Yes, but it also locks up resources that a lot of DOS games need to run. There's a good reason why Win3 has a dramatic lack of serious games compared to DOS.

>>4544781
>ou would then implement a suitable graphical library, as in DOS, because Windows APIs are either absent or primitive, but that's not all
Most Windows 3.x games used off-the-shelf libraries like WinG for graphics blitting. WinG was kind of a proto-DirectX.

>>4544258
Windows 3.11 running in the background means less of valuable resources and CPU time is available to an actual game. Most of Win 3.x games were shovelware tier abhorrent shit written in visual basic, and actual game developers were still stuck writing for DOS until DirectX happened.

>>4544927
>Most of Win 3.x games were shovelware tier abhorrent shit written in visual basic

Yeah but nostalgiafags will defend them anyway.

>>4544781
>Windows 3.x didn't provide anything valuable compared to DOS to most games
The main advantage it offered was for multimedia stuff, for example Myst wouldn't have been workable in DOS.

>>4544932
what multimedia stuff? windows didn't do shit for multimedia until directx

video playback, music, sounds, 2d/3d rendering, all this can be done in DOS if developers write or provide a driver for hardware the game was designed for (and they did had to support a lot of devices to get all those sales - even very early games had to support multiple different graphic and sound cards themselves and this continued until Windows 95)

>>4544942
>windows didn't do shit for multimedia until directx

Don't you remember all the Windows 3.x software with cheesy Quicktime/AVI movies? It was exceedingly common at the time.

>>4544927
Like someone else said, Windows 3.x used concurrent multitasking which forced all processes to get the same amount of CPU time. But then again, the Mac OSes used concurrent multitasking until OS X (why?).

One of my favorites back in the day.

One more classic.

>>4544953
Apple tried throughout the 90s to replace the Mac OS but failed so they eventually just said "Fuck it" and bought a Unix kernel to develop a proper OS with memory protection and preemptive multitasking on.

Is it possible to use Windows 3.1 as a shell for launching DOS games? I'd like to be able to select and launch them from a GUI, but most of them can't run under windows. I'm thinking there's some way to write batch scripts (or .pif files maybe) that exit Windows, call the game, and then start Windows again after the game exits.
When I try to google for info, all the results are about dosbox, which is not relevant to this.

The alternative might be to use some other shell for DOS that is less resource intensive.

>>4544781
>Windows 3.x didn't provide anything valuable compared to DOS to most games

Technically it did all the work of handling protected mode for you although this wasn't that big of a deal once DOS4GW became common and all games used it, allowing a nice, flat 32-bit memory space with total control of all system resources.

>>4544979
>Is it possible to use Windows 3.1 as a shell for launching DOS games?

No. Most DOS games won't even work from within Windows 3.x unless it's an Infocom text adventure or something. Stuff with graphics probably won't work and definitely nothing that uses protected mode.

Also what an odd question. Are you a time traveler from 1994?

>>4544894
> WinG
That's just a method of more or less direct access to video memory. You still need sprite drawing, scrolling, animation, effect, etc. routines.
> like WinG
Not many of those, I suppose? Moreover, it was a 3.x facelift just before introduction of Windows 95, on par with Win32s.

>>4544994
WinG was out in 1994, it predates Windows 95 by some time actually.

>>4544991
>Most DOS games won't even work from within Windows 3.x
I know, that's why I'm asking about a method to automatically exit windows and then launch a game in DOS.
Actually, since I posted I came across a Windows API call that apparently existed as far back as Win3.1, ExitWindowsExec.
>rundll user,exitwindowsexec game.bat
Might work, if rundll exists and works the way I expect it to on windows 3.1

>>4544991
>Also what an odd question. Are you a time traveler from 1994?
Huh?

>>4545001
I was saying because I wondered why anyone in this day and age would ask such a question? It's possible he has a retro PC box with Windows 3.x but I don't see why he'd bother with that considering he could get a Windows 9x box at a yard sale for $10.

>>4545005
>It's possible he has a retro PC box with Windows 3.x but I don't see why he'd bother with that considering he could get a Windows 9x box at a yard sale for $10.
I have both. One for Win9x era games and one for DOS games.

>>4544979
DOS programs can have UI/GUI, too. Making some launcher is trivial, though I believe you just have no idea Norton Commander exist to solve your command prompt chores.

This little classic of which there's sadly no way to play it on a modern OS because it was never updated for 32-bit like the original Incredible Machine.

>>4545012
>Norton Commander exists
That would fall under "other less resource intensive shell" wouldn't it? I could also use the builtin "dosshell" program, although it's not very pretty. I like the idea of having a folder in my launder with pretty icons and such. I'm going to try this DLL call idea as soon as I'm finished with work, and if that doesn't work I'll have to look into other shells like Commander.

>>4545013
Wasn't that originally released for DOS? It should be playable on DOSBox, no?

>>4545017
You can play Windows 3.1 games in DOSBox anyway, you just need to set up a disk image with a Win3 installation.

>>4545017
It is but the DOS version lacks all the multimedia goodies of the Windows one. Compare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl7lHJz7E5A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ-Hcex6eo0

As I said, the main asset Windows 3.x had over DOS was multimedia support.

>>4545015
Running Windows only to close it in a moment and run some game smells idiocy to me. If you're true to the core, just make a custom *Commander menu to launch DOS games. Or write a simple Turbo Pascal / Turbo C TUI with Turbo Vision. If you want GUI, drawing some icons and colorful buttons isn't hard either.

Windows 3.x games from my experience generally required a 486 PC while DOS stuff usually ran on older, slower 386s. Probably because the Windows environment required a faster CPU to get acceptable performance out of the game.

>>4545026
Or most likely the multimedia stuff.

>>4543576
This.
I dislike the isometric view sequels

>>4543569
Another classic with no way to play it on a modern OS.

If anyone else is interested in being able to launch DOS-only games from Windows 3.1, I finally tracked down a utility that can do it.
This was a little tool distributed in a 1995 edition of PC Magazine (they used to have hundreds of these), called LaunchControl.
>LaunchControl lets you control how DOS and Windows applications are launched under Windows 3.1.
>For Windows programs, LaunchControl lets you set the environment variables and the window size and position.
>For DOS programs launched under Windows, LaunchControl lets you automatically close Windows, run the program, and then restart Windows.

I found a still-live archive of the PC Magazine utilities, including the archive containing this tool, here ftp://www.capitolcityonline.net/simtel.199901-1/PCMAG/v14n17.zip

>>4545119
I remember having something like that back in the day. Thanks for the link anon.

>>4544959
This one just used the Windows GDI. Most commercial software used graphics libraries like WinG.

>>4543468
Sierra did a version of Lode Runner for Windows 3.x. It uses the Windows API to some extent, but I don't think it relies on it too heavily. I see there's also a DOS port.

>>4544927
>>4544973
These's games look cool.

>>4543575

Did you know irregardless isn't a word?

>>4545317
At this point, using non-words like that is a class signifier that says "I don't care about your elitist ivory tower education." It's kind of like ebonics for midwestern white people.

>>4545331
I get it, Anon. You hate your redneck father from Indiana.

>>4545313
I'm pretty sure it uses WinG like almost all commercial Windows 3.x games.

>>4544994
>That's just a method of more or less direct access to video memory
Actually no, WinG does perform a lot of the same functions as DirectX.

>WinG introduced a new type of DC called a WinGDC,[5] which allowed programmers to both read and write to it directly using device-independent bitmaps (DIBs) with the wingdib.drv driver. Effectively, it gave programmers the ability to do with Windows what they'd been doing without hardware access limitations in DOS for years. Programmers could write DIBs to the WinGDC, yet would still have access to the individual bits of the image data. This meant that fast graphics algorithms could be written to allow fast scrolling, overdraw, dirty rectangles, double buffering, and other animation techniques. WinG also provided much better performance when blitting graphics data to physical graphics device memory. Since WinG used the DIB format, it was possible to mix original GDI API calls and WinG calls.[5]

>>4545373
Windows 3.x software still requires it to run on later versions of Windows, but it doesn't do actually anything there except pass the API calls on to DirectX.

>>4545349
At least it's not Wyoming.

>>4545313
I seem to remember that using 640x480 mode in DOS was a major headache because of having to page everything in 64k chunks.

>>4545395
It is if you use real mode. In protected mode, you just get a linear video buffer. That DOS version of LRTLR is probably a protected mode game that uses DOS4GW like the vast majority of DOS games by 1994.

>>4545407
>That DOS version of LRTLR is probably a protected mode game that uses DOS4GW like the vast majority of DOS games by 1994.

Real mode games were still pretty common at that late date, I can think of Colonization and Ultimate Football '95 as two examples.

>>4544997
It was, but Windows 95 was in development at that time and WinG was heavily sponsored by Microsoft as a way of adding some of its capabilities to Windows 3.x.

>>4545415
Yes but those games are both 320x200 resolution which has a single 64k page.

To anyone who remembers the game....
>Stars!

GNU Chess, but it was later redone as a 32-bit version so you can just play that on modern Windows.

>>4544781
Did make it easier to set up and run the program instead of spending hours fucking with a CONFIG.SYS file.

>>4543468
Kids pix
Civ 2

This is my era. The Multimedia PC age of CD-Rom ports of floppy disk DOS titles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za-oVpQC2oA

My favourite titles:

Pic related
Klik & Play
Leisure Suit Larry 6
Anything by 7th Level

>>4543652

They came out on DOS first and were updated for Windows 95 with a larger resolution.

>>4545360
WinG was barely used dude, the vast majority used the slow Win3.1 native rendering. WinG was released at the end of Win3.1's life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG
Protip: its only 15 pieces of commercial software

>>4545650
>using Wikipedia for information
Shig.

Besides, I know for a fact that all those Windows 3.x Sierra games like The Incredible Machine used it.

>>4545654
>>4545650
>>4544497
>>4545360

>>/vr/thread/S4460598#p4471046

This thread from a month ago has exactly the same posts in it. What.

>>4545662
Probably one guy arguing with himself for whatever inane reason.

>>4545631
>Klik & Play
I played the shit out of a demo, those SFX never failed to make me laugh.

>>4543803

>>4545690
There we go. No wonder, the Windows version was Addy Jr and not Adi Jr like the Amiga one. This brings back a lot of memories, most of them on the fringe of autism and insanity.

My dad had to upgrade our PC's original 8MB of RAM to run this thing properly because it would run into the swap file and the speech/animation would get really choppy. A world of difference compared to that primitive-looking Amiga version.

>>4545697
>A world of difference compared to that primitive-looking Amiga version
Like someone else said, you're comparing a game designed for a 486 PC with a game designed for a 1980s machine with an 8Mhz CPU.

I played so much Castle of the Winds as a kid. Me and my brother kept a diary of how many experience points we gained from each enemy. It seemed such a long, exciting, difficult game.

I tried to replay it maybe 2 years ago- I found it too simplistic and boring. Maybe it was all nostalgia after all?

>>4545698
Yeah well, that's what they get for insisting on coding the game for an almost 10 year old machine.

>>4545698
Yeah well, that's what they get for insisting on coding the game for an almost 10 year old machine. I mean, imagine still making a game for 286 PCs with EGA graphics in 1994. Laugh out loud.

>>4543762
That's weird to see an Amiga game in hi-res. Normally only application software used that.

>>4545710
By the time you get to 1994, even the AGA Amigas were inferior to the latest PC hardware. Once they had local bus video, it was game over.

>>4545718
The planar video on the Amiga was a killer compared to those nice linear VGA modes.

>>4545720
Really. It made sense in the 80s but by the 90s there was no reason anymore to still have planar graphics.

>>4545710
Software companies were massively autistic. They were all like "hurr we have to support the old as mold A500 because it has a bigger userbase"

And don't even get me started on that Amiga X-COM and its mandatory swapping six floppies.

1997 and still a Windows 3.x game.

>make thread asking for Windows 3.x game recs
>get a bunch of preschooler games
I don't care how much nostalgia you have for the things, I'm not playing them and this is insulting to my intelligence.

>>4545761
yeah that's a little weird. maybe the dev didn't have the latest hardware.

>make thread asking for Windows 3.x game recs
>get a bunch of preschooler games
I don't care how much nostalgia you have for the things, I'm not playing them and this is insulting to my intelligence.

>>4545771
Whaddya want? Most of the big boy games for grown-ups were still DOS-based back then.

>>4545771
>insulting to my intelligence
No one is going to commit sudoku because you didn't like a thread, anon.

>>4545771
That's because most Win3x games were either edutainment games marketed to schools, or short simple games meant to be played on a work break. DOS was the preferred platform for actual "gamer" games.

>>4545975
Fuck yeah, Castle of the Winds and Exile. Only shit missing is Micro Man and Mordor

>>4545761
Windows 3.1 wasn’t officially discontinued until 2001 so you can bet a lot of edutainment games would still strive for backwards compatibility for poor schools that hadn’t updated their systems since the mid 90s.

>>4543468
SimCity 2000 which surprisingly still works on windows 10

>>4545992
And Lander. And that one paper airplane game I forget the name of. And Sim City 2000, apparently? I could have sworn that was a Windows 95 game.

Want to be retro at retro? Get Atari Action Pack for Windows.

> CD-ROM
> 3 MB

>>4546048
That would probably be the Windows 95 rerelease which was 32-bit. The original 1994 release certainly won't run on modern Windows.

>>4546082
>And Lander
This thing. It dates from circa 1991 and will run uncontrollably fast on a machine above 33Mhz. I actually tried it on a Pentium 4 XP box and the second you hit a key to start, your lunar lander crashed instantaneously.

But it was updated for 32-bit Windows if you want to play it on a modern machine.

>>4546005
Civilization II being released as a Windows 3.x game in 1996 is a little hard to account for though.

>>4545761
96

>only 15 games used WinG
My left nut. Almost anything that had 256 colors and full sprite animation used it. That's why no school will accept Wikipedia as a source for a report/term paper.

>>4546518
>>4546195
It's not like all Windows 3.x PCs magically disappeared off the earth in August 1995 when Windows 95 went on sale.

>>4546667
>August 1995
I didn't know it came out that late in the year.

>>4545975
JezzBall was great, but why does the icon for Maxwell's Maniac look like the same game? I am just now realizing that the gameplay of JezzBall could be described as the player taking the role of Maxwell's Demon.

>>4546671
It did. In fact people were complaining about how long it took to get a 32-bit consumer version of Windows out and that Windows 3.1 was getting old and in need of a replacement.

>>4546480
This is a standard game formula that has been implemented on every platform from Chip-8 to javascript.
It goes back to 1969 apparently.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game_genre)

>>4546679
>It goes back to 1969 apparently
What a coincidence.

>>4546685
The concept of landing on the moon is much older than the first manned moon landing, and the first reverse-thrust landings (like what the game simulates) were in 1966. What is your point? There are hundreds of games called "Lander" and none of them is unique or definitive.

>>4546675
Maxwell's Maniac is basically a variation on Jezzball (or maybe it's the other way around, I don't know which one was first). There's a wall with a hole in it that you slide up and down, and the object is to get all the balls from the right side to the left side.

>>4546679
That's fascinating, was this game used to train actual astronauts?

>>4547627
>There's a wall with a hole in it that you slide up and down, and the object is to get all the balls from the right side to the left side.
/r/OutOfContext

>>4543468
simtower is one of my all-time favorite games
chip's challenge was also great

>>4545013
windows 3.11 runs fine on dosbox, virtualbox, or vmware. i recommend dosbox personally; the way i have it set up, i just launch dosbox and type win to go to windows.

>>4543468
I remember playing some game from this era where you either played as a mouse avoiding mouse traps and you had to get to the end of a maze. Kind of like chips challenge. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

Most Windows 3.x games of worth were updated for Windows 95.

>>4547702
>type win to go to windows
It seems like you're doing too much work
You can have a different config file for each game/program and make a desktop shortcut for each config file

>>4544979
You can create custom menu in Norton Commander. Command folders are also supported. You just set DOS command and name. No icons though.

>>4545024

Oh, there's a straightforward, period-correct way: make a simple batch file menu. If you want fancier stuff, you can call some graphical mode program that sets the errorlevel on exit based on your choice.

>>4544932
>>4545023

If by “multimedia” you mean “program that hangs, plays a bling sound that matches some action, then un-hangs”, or “program that provides custom animated controls, like moving flashlight or mascot during search operation, that are bundled as AVI files”, then, yes, Windows made it really easy to implement with only a couple of MCI calls. (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vs/alm/dd757151(v=vs.85).aspx By the way, what was that string-based API? I suppose it is the only time Microsoft did that. [Well, maybe also DDE. Was that used anywhere aside from Hearts network multiplayer?] Had they had scripting in mind way before it became common?)

If by “multimedia” you mean “Cinepak FMVs”, well, Windows games had those. And 3DO games had those. And DOS games had those. Mostly everything with a CD-ROM had. As you know, Myst was made with Mac's proto-Prower-Point-proto-Flash application, therefore, its system should get the credit for that. There were no technical reasons preventing DOS port of Myst, they had to make a new engine anyway.

>>4545407
> In protected mode, you just get a linear video buffer.

You get it if the card supports VBE 2.0 protected mode extensions.

By the way, Chasm: The Rift has those nice high resolution modes, and it seems that Dosbox doesn't look real enough to enable them. I've never seen it mentioned that Chasm has multiplayer split-screen spectator option, but can assure it looked extra nice at 1280×960 when we ran it on school network back in the days.

>>4545373

Actually, there's little more phony than sharing the Wikipedia knowledge when it should be clear the talk is on different level, and when you don't even understand what your citations mean. You are liberal arts major, aren't you? Who else would believe that mere power of sufficiently twisted words stripped of any meaning can bring success?

WinG API has mere 10 functions, a couple of them that do actual work allow you to transfer bitmaps and set the palette, bypassing the GDI abstractions. As I said, it's just a direct memory access. The WinG SDK (WING10.EXE) readme states that:
> WinG version 1.0 provides fast DIB-to-screen blts under Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows NT version 3.5.
You have to implement everything else in your code. The famous Win32 SDK help file (from Windows 95 OSR2 times) has not a single trace of WinG left, supporting the idea of it being the specific solution for Windows 3. There isn't a lot of information anyway, but searching for "WinGRecommendDIBFormat" provides some interesting finds. The “Writing HOT Games for Microsoft® Windows™” handbook states that WinG was released to public around May-June 1994:
https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~tsemple/games/gamesum.txt
http://tech-insider.org/windows/research/acrobat/940929-a.pdf
That gives about two years of active lifetime.

(Also, don't miss these would-be OLE features:
> Drag & Drop monsters from one game space to another;
Game implemented as a graph of COM objects, not today, but in the 90s!
> embedding game sessions into mail messages that can automatically connect you over a network or modem, etc.
If only you knew…)

>>4548005
>You get it if the card supports VBE 2.0 protected mode extensions.
The VESA standard. By the time you get to 1994, this was standard on all PC video cards.

>>4548005
>There were no technical reasons preventing DOS port of Myst, they had to make a new engine anyway

The Windows version of Myst was most likely done by taking the original source code (most likely written in C or something) and recompiling it with Windows libraries.

>>4548016
Yes, the “original source code” for HyperCard Apple kindly donated to Myst developers.

Don't be an idiot.

>>4548015
VBE 2.0 was only *introduced* in 1994. WTF are you smoking?

>>4543552

>>4545000
Nope, no RUNDLL.EXE on Windows 3.x.

Though strictly speaking, there's no good reason why the Win95 version wouldn't work (apart from MS doing a version check - which isn't a good reason).

>>4545407
IF your graphics card actually presented a VESA LFB - a lot didn't at the time.

>>4546470
It does work with fairly recent versions of Windows - I accidentally installed the 16-bit (that is, 3.x) version on Windows 7 a few years back.

>>4548005
What fucking horrible, broken sound card (drivers) did you have, anon?

>>4548069
This. My Tseng Labs VLB card I bought in 1996 (yes, I know, that means it had probably been on the shelf for a while) didn't support VESA LFB. Needed to load SciTech Display Doctor IIRC.

>>4548105
It is not about sound drivers, it is about novice/lazy programmers playing sound synchronously in the mail loop.

With Windows 3.x, you usually needed separate video drivers particular to your card. Eventually at some point during the Windows 9x era, they went to a universal SVGA driver.

>>4543468
Nobody used that shit, we went from DOS to Win95.

There was this game... it was a strategy game, you had a map and you had your units (solid color silhouettes), you could name those units (or you could name the player), advance wars like, very early... now I think of it , it was win 95. But if anyone know what game I'm talking about, I've been looking for it for years.

>>4546048
My aunt works (worked) as a civil servant, a coworker of her and family friend would have sim city , I was a kid and playing that as well, he told me the trick where you lower / raise taxes.

>>4548948
>Nobody used that shit, we went from DOS to Win95
I went from DOS 6.22/WfW 3.11 to Windows 98 and skipped 95 entirely.

>>4549528
https://archive.org/details/Panzerkrieg_1020
Perhaps this?
(Multiplayer through DDE, wild stuff.)

>>4547776
I dunno, Rodent's Revenge?

>>4550238
rattler race

>>4543468
Minesweeper. Too bad Microshit wants me to register and pay for what used to be free.

winbump.exe

Does anyone know how to get Win 3.x connected to the internet through DOSbox?

>>4554806
Use Windows for Workgroups Network Starter Kit (software and hardware for two users). Hardware includes 2 Intel EtherExpress 16 network adapters (software configurable), 2 T-connectors, 2 terminators, 25 feet of RG-58 coaxial cable, WatchMe Second Install Video, and 1 screwdriver.

Ignore the XP interface, this shit was on the same CD that came with the rest of the 9x pack. Critical Mass was interesting because despite being turn-based, each movement had momentum and a degree of aiming was necessary.

>>4554806
>Does anyone know how to get Win 3.x connected to the internet through DOSbox?
I don't think that's possible because DOSBox doesn't emulate all of the hardware support that would be needed for Internet use. Even if it did, why would you want to aside from some weird vaporware retro kink fetish?

>>4544973
my nigga

>>4554983
>some weird vaporware retro kink fetish
That's pretty much it, actually.

>>4555267
If that's what you're into, you should rig up a physical machine. It's actually not that hard to get online with DOS/Win3. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 helps.

>>4555290
>If that's what you're into, you should rig up a physical machine
Now let's get him a time machine to 1998 when people were dumping Windows 3.x boxes at yard sales for $10.
>It's actually not that hard to get online with DOS/Win3.
Oh, you poor fool. If only you knew just how much bullshit setting up PC hardware was back then. Today you just plug something in and have it auto-configure and Windows searches online for a driver. It wasn't like that in 1993, no, not at all.

Try spending hours manually adjusting configuration files and possibly moving jumper blocks on an ISA modem card.

I'm not kidding. You don't want to try to get a Windows 3.x machine online, you really don't. The payoff would be really meager for the amount of effort spent on setting it up too.

>>4555296
You can see one of my DOS machines on the right edge here >>4555061
>If only you knew just how much bullshit setting up PC hardware was back then
This has been my hobby since "back then."
Setting up DOS installations is easier today than it was in the past because over the years people have released better drivers and utilities than were available at the time.
>Try spending hours manually adjusting configuration files and possibly moving jumper blocks on an ISA modem card.
I do, honestly that's more of a game to me than actual games. I just like making things work. I think it's quite rewarding, and once you figure it out it's really not that hard. Sometimes there is just a lot of trial and error.

>>4555298
>I'm not kidding. You don't want to try to get a Windows 3.x machine online, you really don't. The payoff would be really meager for the amount of effort spent on setting it up too.
It's not really useful to have internet access, but local network access on your old machines is very handy. It's by far the easiest way to get software onto old computers. I have a USB floppy drive I can use if I need to make a bootdisk or something, but I wouldn't want to transfer hundreds of MB that way. Instead I just download things on my modern computer and then copy them over the network.

>>4554939
OK, you didn't realize the joke wasn't just a joke.

You need a network stack for your system. Even Windows 9x didn't enable it by default if network hardware wasn't present (so there was no localhost, at all). Windows for Workgroups has it.

Dosbox has had NE2000 emulation available for years, but not in mainline. It allows you to bridge virtual adapter with real interface.

Also, there is modem/nullmodem configuration for COM ports. I haven't tried that, but suppose that should allow terminal sessions across the network, and everything that works on top of that.

>>4545761
Technically Elmo's preschool was released in 1996, but yeah, most of the mid 90s sesame street games were win 3.1 compatable

>>4543516

spoken like a true console peasant
go back to your japanese distopia

the immortal is a great game
it has shit reviews to keep peasants away from it

originally an apple2gs game, but the dos version is actually different, with added features, and is the best

really ignore any bad reviews
they are mainly from sega players from the 90s who all hated this game because gamers from the 90s were the most severely autistic shits ever on earth

>>4555526
>Technically Elmo's preschool was released in 1996, but
Mobygames has it as 97 and says the Mac version came out even later (1998) yet is still designed for a 68040 machine with 8MB of RAM even though this was after the iMac and G3 were out.

>>4555576
Well, it has been in development since at least 1995, as it was set for release that winter

>>4543468
the magic school bus explores the solar system and Arthur adventure games.