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.
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Original URL: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/XQLiXT7u5ME/internet-archive-brings-classic-windows-31-apps-to-your-browser