Windows 3.1 Flash Edition | Hacker News Reader

Windows 3.1 Flash Edition

sdomi.pl

134 pointspicture33 comments

I was worried someone had re-created Win 3.1 in Flash and was like "but how will I view that?" but this is much cooler.

Also, props for having the best Gem in the site header.

[EDIT] Also, this site and all the "friends / cool people" sites on main page are outstanding. If this is what The Youths are up to, they might be alright after all.

[EDIT EDIT] sorry for assuming you're one of The Youths if you're not, most of the photos on the other sites (jesus, that comes off creepy, sorry again) looked fairly young so I made some assumptions.

at the bottom of the page:

> © sdomi 2010-2022

fwiw

Spotted that after I posted, probably makes something around 24 the lowest likely age, but I'm just old enough that that's still The Youths to me :-)

[EDIT] Anyway I wasn't trying to be weird about this, just complimenting some awesome young people (some of the others definitely appear to be in the "young people" range) so I'll just leave it there. I'm just going to quietly check out these delightful throwback hobbyist sites and not engage again so I stop being such an awkward old weirdo :-)

With Cheerpx thanks WebAssembly.

https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/

It would not surprise me if someone managed to build DosBox running inside of Flash. Maybe a build made for ASMJS could (slowly) work.

> The Youths

for context: you've stumbled on the queer tech subculture of the fediverse; we're mostly in our 20s or teens

> sites on main page are outstanding

maia's is my favourite

The trans programming community is strange and interesting, also many of them seem to be in a polyamorous relationship with each other. It’s definitely a social dynamic I’ve never seen before, and almost intimidating from the outside

I love hearing the circles I run in (I'm a CS major, although I barely program anymore, and I'm queer and poly) described from an anthropological distance. It's very funny :P

FWIW there were several joke Windows environments posted to Newgrounds back in the day, such as this one: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/27549

I'm very confused by this... It says Windows 3.1 but the Recycle Bin and screenshot clearly show Windows 9x. The Minesweeper screenshot is definitely from Windows 3.x, though. What sort of wizardry is this?

Calmira! It’s a third party shell replacement for Program Manager that provides a Win9x “feel”.

http://www.calmira.de/

I much prefer WPS4WIN which implements OS/2's WorkPlace Shell on Windows 3.x. Here are some screenshots: http://toastytech.com/guis/wps.html

I combine this with a Windows 3.x tool called MAKEOVER which lets you edit the window buttons in your video driver. This lets me make the window buttons in the Windows apps look like OS/2 buttons.

Wow, I had forgotten about those weird tabbed notebooks. :)

Reminds me of the shell replacement Microsoft released to provide a Win95-style UI in Windows NT 3.51[1]. I ran it for a while in 95/96. Somewhere in my closet I still have the CD-ROM pack with the OS and the addon...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.51#NewShell

Fascinating. So he's loaded a full instance of Dos/Win3.1 onto the chip used for the Thinkpad's BIOS itself? Very cool.

One thing I didn't understand was why it was necessary to dismantle the laptop as shown in the first pic. Some more details around that would be useful. Presumably something about getting around the flashing limitations if one was to attempt it purely from a software approach?

Taking the thinkpad apart is part of flashing the bios, which usually is just clipping an SOIC8 clip to the bios chip and using CH341a SPI usb programmer to flash it. I did the same to my thinkpad x220 to flash it with coreboot.

Thanks for that. I was still wondering why the flashing couldn't be achieved on a running system as-per the usual method of updating the proprietary manufacturer's BIOS. I found this key quote on the Coreboot web site:

There are various protection schemes that make it impossible to modify or replace a firmware from a running system. coreboot allows to disable these mechanisms, making it possible to overwrite (or update) the firmware from a running system.

Usually you must use the external method once to install a retrofitted coreboot and then you can use the internal method for future updates.

https://doc.coreboot.org/tutorial/flashing_firmware/index.ht...

Oh, I remember this person - they wrote the minecraft server in bash.

Haruhi is an anachronism here, that was well into the Windows XP era.

Super nice! 3.1 was my first OS back when I was 5... The first app I ever executed was WordStar and the first game was Prince of Persia hahahaha! OMG! shit, its been a long time!

Dang. This too took me back. My dad was working at a place that was doing software for digital medical records. I don't remember the details, but they got like a pallet full of touch-screen Windows 3.11 386 laptops and my dad ended up with one. Surfed the web as a kid in his office on it somewhere around 1997. Dang, its been forever. I had a had-me-down 286 with a CD-ROM and spent many hours in MS Dinosaurs and Encarta 95

Too bad it does not have Sound Blaster emulation.

For coreboot there are actually some interesting low-level emulation options: The PCH has "I/O Trap" settings, where you can set about 4 ISA I/O ranges to be trapped (generates an SMI, so the SMM code can handle it), so it should be possible to emulate the Sound Blaster I/O port behavior.

I don't know if the trap mechanism allows you to also trap the ISA DMA ports, which you'd need to do for DMA emulation.

Slightly higher level you could use classic VMM or more modern hypervisor functionality to do the emulation.

How soon before we can squeeze a basic Linux distro into UEFI?

that's already possible

With the EFI stub in the Linux kernel and the ability to embed an initrd in the kernel, you can boot a small distribution with just the kernel file. The only issue is that it takes a long time to load a very large kernel into memory like that.

I tried that with a buildroot based hypervisor I created for my home lab.

I remember doing something similar, only using pxe to chain boot Linux from an HTTP server. iirc we used https://ipxe.org/

I put a nearly full TinyCore Linux distribution (incl GUI and WiFi drivers) into the ROM of my Thinkpad X210 using Coreboot, fun little project.

I suppose a better question then is, why isn't this routinely done for factory firmware? It seems that such a distro would be immensely helpful for any kind of recovery. Not to mention that, if it has a web browser, it could be used in a pinch to get stuff done even on a machine with a failed SSD etc.

Lenovo has some form of what appears to be Linux on their newest laptops that can do internet based recovery of the OS. I haven't had time to play with it. It's been way too long coming - Apple devices can boot into a lightweight MacOS and do this and have been able to forever.

Monthly firmware servicing for a bajillion models (to maintain a level of security) isn't exactly something that the OEMs want to sign up for.

About a web browser, forget it with the current SPI flash sizing that vendors use on PCs. Those are way too small for that.

Asus used to ship it on their laptops,

https://www.rarst.net/software/asus-express-gate/

(2019)

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