Windows 3.1 Online - With Minesweeper | Hacker News Reader

Windows 3.1 Online - With Minesweeper

michaelv.org

210 pointsjmonegro57 comments

Awesome - I was just playing a JavaScript version of Lemmings: http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/. It's like I'm back in 1994 using the old '486!

I called my wife over and showed her how nerdy an upbringing I really had. I remember when 3.1 was new.

Ha ha - I found that site in the first place because my wife saw me playing GoldRunner on KDE and freaked out. "Oh my gosh - is that LEMMINGS!?" That, of course, made me freak out. "You know about LEMMINGS!?" So I just HAD to play Lemmings that day.

The official lemmings is sadly down :( http://www.xs4all.nl/~crisp/lemmings/

Wow! I really like the attention to detail. You can change the desktop wallpaper with the genuine Windows 3.1 tile images, you can create and save files (which download to your actual computer), wildcards work in the file selection dialog...

Of course not everything works, but this is a lot of fun.

xyzzy <shfit>+<return> doesn't work in minesweeper, which was the first thing I 'tested'. I also tried xyzzy <return> <shift>+<return> because that's how I remembered it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xyzzy)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/131764/recursive.png

Well, somebody had to. I could get it to nest 10-fold, but after that the innermost browser window was unresponsive.

http://i49.tinypic.com/11b2o7m.jpg 24 w/ opera

Awesome. Exact same thing I did.

I browsed to my blog which has a frame breaker - http://alicious.com/2009/remove-digg-bar-from-website/ - and it broke out... had forgotten I had the frame breaker until then.

Who else tried running MS-DOS > dir right away? :)

Disappointed to see the 'type' command didn't work.

Or starting notepad.

Programs like Notepad can be started that way too, but there's no PATH set. So you have to "cd windows" first.

I did too :)

I tried the del command. lol

Tried "ls", used to Cygwin.

I always try ls even when I'm on the real windows terminal, and I suffer each time it happens. Fortunately it's a rare event.

One of the first things I do on a new windows box is put a batch file called ls.bat in a directory in my path that just calls dir!

First thing I do is install Cygwin.

Ah, so I'm not the only one experiencing suffering when having to use Windows. :)

Recently learned about AndLinux [1] and CoLinux [2] -- running a Linux kernel atop Windows. Didn't use it yet but looks promising.

[1] http://www.andlinux.org/ [2] http://www.colinux.org/

I tend to drop windows ports of a bunch of unix command line utils somewhere in my PATH

http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

Install powershell, or use win 7 (comes with powershell). It comes preconfigured with aliases for rm, ls, cat, etc...

I tried launching a web browser then browsing to the app and launching 3.1 again within itself, then again, then again ;)

No edlin, no debug. I was disappointed.

Wow. That brings back memories in a big way. Just needs trumpet winsock, mIRC, and a nuker.

Only problem I see is anti-aliased fonts. Those didn't get added until ClearType came along in Windows XP.

Windows 98 had antialiased fonts.

Hey, Internet Browser passes the Acid 3 test!

The user string for the browser is whatever browser you happen to be using at the time. In Firefox 3.5.7 I get 93/100 on acid 3 from the internet browser in the app.

It's odd that the address bar in the browser reverts to 127.0.0.1 no matter where you are. Does that happen to anyone else?

Getting the current URL of an embedded frame showing a page on an external domain is (or at least should be) impossible due to restrictions on cross-site scripting. This is the same reason why when you view a page that's trapped in a Diggbar-style frame, if you click a link inside the framed site and later close the "bar", you get redirected back to the initial site. Try it: http://digg.com/u3L7UJ

i'm amazed that he didn't use a single helper javascript. no jquery, etc. Incredible.

Minesweeper doesn't end after you beat it, timer just keeps going.

When you right-click to mark where the mines are, the browser's popup menu comes up and you have to click again to get rid of the menu, thus eating up valuable minesweeping time. Can that be suppressed?

Timer stops when you mark all mines with a flag not when you uncover all safe squares. Also, left+right mouse function is missing (reveal all squares next to current one if mines have been marked).

Pardon my ignorance (hope I'm not kicked out of HN), but how does this work? Is there a server? Is it pure Javascript? Clueless...

It's mostly Javascript and good ol' html/css. You can browse the source of the site with your web browser and check out all the JS goodness. There has to be a server to host the site, but I don't think it plays any other major role.

Thanks! (I realized after my submission that asking if there is a server is way too ignorant...)

Did Windows 3.1 have a Paint program?

Also, this reminds me about how I used to carry around MiniVMac (a Macintosh emulator) running OS 7 on a thumb drive to keep random notes and drawings. It would be kind of cool if you could sign up an account on this site for that purpose.

Yes it did. I remember my brother and I "playing" Paint, thinking it was one of the best computer games out there.

He could add my implementation at http://canvaspaint.org -- just a few bugfixes and style changes to do :)

man, there was no web browser in windows 3.1. not even in windows for workgroups 3.11.

Although Internet Explorer 5 can be installed on 3.11.

Check out the media player, there's some gems in there (like the Sesame Street skit).

One of his other projects thats pretty ingenious.

http://www.michaelv.org/projects/labs/wireless.php

Where's QBasic?

Especially since there is already a JavaScript-based QBasic engine: http://ajaxian.com/archives/qbasic-on-javascript

Excellent.. I remember my 90s !

Does it have a .bmp viewer?

If only I could play "canyon.mid" with Media Player...

Where is ski-free?

Where's gopher?

awesome!!

cool

Nostalgia!

Where's Bomberman?!?

Windows 3.1 Online -

like Windows 3.1, but more Ron Paul.

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