Posted by enlyth 14 hours ago
386 mode in Windows 2 (sold as Windows/386) and 3 was really a 32-bit operating system for 16-bit applications.
Win32s allowed some 32-bit apps to run on windows 3.1 and up. Including many versions of Internet Explorer (Microsoft also released ie as a 16-bit application, though).
This makes me curious to know if CDPLAYER.EXE would still work (unmodified, without extra DLLs) with a real CD-ROM drive if you ran it on a Windows 11 machine with one installed.
It acts generally weird (buy a £10 dvd drive from ebay and try it yourself if you want any more detail, useful thing to have anyway) and obviously I can't get it to play anything.
The RTM version gets a bit further, doesn't show that weird Explorer error, but I still can't get it to play anything and opening the playlist crashes it vs on the Beta version where it actually listed the tracks.
I suspect the cd player is trying to take control of the drive and fighting with Windows trying to be helpful, don't know if there's a way to turn it off.
Edit: i meant ImgDrive as a suggestion for those without optical drives. I have several, I'll test em out
It's a thing for making little black and white animations. (With GIF export.)
It was popular in the early 2000s and there was a subculture around it on animation forums.
English version (hey, still online!):
https://www.superfundungeonrun.com/easytoon/
Original version (Japanese, w/ screenshots):
https://web.archive.org/web/20020111185602/http://www.radium...
There's also a forked version on a French website (also available in English) with some extra features. But I like to keep it simple :)
> I can't even run a binary from one Linux distro to the other
[filename]: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.38' not found (required by [filename])
The other way around works fine, though, and you can avoid it by statically linking the binary when you build it.
The downside of dynamically linked binaries: every tool of medium complexity needs a close-enough version of a common library, and once those get upgraded, the tool dies.
Most statically compiled version should work with a compatible enough libc, but I haven't seen many old programs like that.
Wine, on the other hand, runs tools from the 90s just fine, as long as they're 32 bit.
More broadly, there are things like manylinux and MUSL which allow cross-distro applications.
As long as the container bundles the right libc, the program should work.
Current NetBSD still has good support for running SunOS binaries, though, including graphical ones. I'm certain you could get a SunOS 4.x binary from pre-1992 to run on NetBSD/SPARC. I've no idea how far back you could potentially go on NetBSD/m68k -- probably quite a ways, especially if the binaries are statically linked. SunOS pre-1988 was all static linking!
(Running "real" 4.3BSD binaries might be hard -- I think NetBSD/VAX defaults to ULTRIX compat, which is an either/or thing versus strict Berkeley Unix compatibility. Same binary format, similar but incompatible syscalls/data structures.)
And if you want to run them on Wayland, Worg will do that for you. https://github.com/jmalcolm137/Worg
Honestly, if NTVDM was part of Windows then it seems fair to use it, even 3rd party clones.
I was aiming for something you could double click on vanilla Windows and would just work out of the box