The Internet Archive has made it possible for you to make a virtual visit to the wide, wide world of Windows 3.1 games (and other apps, too), via a collection of virtualized images. Jason Scott is the game collector and digital archivist behind the online museum of malware mentioned here a few days ago. “Now,” Ars Technica reports, “Scott and his crew have done it again with the Windows 3.X Showcaseâ”made up of a whopping 1,523 downloads (and counting), all running in a surprisingly robust, browser-based JavaScript emulation of Windows 3.1. You’ll recognize offerings like WinRisk and SkiFree, but the vast majority of the collection sticks to a particularly wild world of Windows shareware history, one in which burgeoning developers seemed to throw everything imaginable against 3.1’s GUI wall to see what stuck.” Says the article: A volunteer “really did the hard work” of getting the Windows files required for each DOSBOX instance down to 1.8 MBâ”and in the process came up with a more centralized version of those files on his server’s side, as opposed to kinds that would require optimizations for every single emulated app.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original URL: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/XQLiXT7u5ME/internet-archive-brings-classic-windows-31-apps-to-your-browser
