I just did something neat-
I tried out the install of Windows 3.1, which has a version of Visual Basic installed. I created a small program in Visual Basic, with a window and some buttons to press, and then saved the program as an .exe (remember how easy this used to be! you could make your program and then just... save the executable out of VB! No compiler knowledge needed!)
I then saved this .exe to a disk image, and then saved that disk image back to my modern mac that I'm doing this on via downloading that in the browser.
I then took that .exe and the only dependency - vbrun100.dll - and put it on a floppy (a real one) and then took that floppy over to a vintage computer I have that has Windows 3.1 on it still (an old 25 MHz Intel486 DX industrial computer I have sitting in a closet with no real use for). Popped in the floppy, copied the .exe and .dll.
And ran the program, no problem!
A real GUI windows program, made in VB running in Windows 3.1, inside an entire emulated machine in Javascript in a browser window running on an Apple Silicon macbook in 2026....
Exported and saved to disk and then ran without issue on a piece of hardware made in *1992*!
Now I need to do the reverse... make some software with a copy of VB installed on this old machine of mine and run it on my mac inside the browser.
Yes, just tried this, and my little exe ran on a Windows 10 64 bit machine just fine.
Which means I just built a demo of a tiny 16 bit windows GUI applet, using emulated VB in Win 3.1 in a browser and got it to run on modern Windows in a shorter amount of time than it would have likely taken me to get the same type of demo up and running natively in Windows 10 today.
Those who consider every little JS framework, iPhone and AI iteration "revolutionary", go check the thing labeled "Visicalc (1981)" on this site to learn what a revolution looks like.
PS: Nine Princes in Amber was an interesting choice alongside the others!
I have my IBM PC set up (to go through a Peter Norton assembly language book again) but I got a file read error for the first time recently on the 20 MB (Seagate ST-225) hard drive and parity errors from the RAM (again). I have chips (pretty cheap, industry standard chips) I can swap out to fix it hopefully. Anyway, I could just be emulating it instead (lol).
Cool, they have Exploring the IBM PC. It was a bootable disk with a tutorial to teach you how to use the computer (like what the scroll lock button was meant to do, and all the other keys on the original keyboard). I loaded up the CGA version on the CGA IBM PC emulator, which also plays music. The sound was cutting out though. In a later part (the Fun Writer) when you can turn on the "radio", the music seems to be missing the rests. I guess it's not perfect. The program always struck me as doing strange things with the hardware, so that might be why. (I'll have to look into some local emulators to try out. I really only need DOS for what I'm doing. I also have a MisterFPGA...)
I have a couple of enthusiast friends who use CompactFlash-to-IDE adapters, and that’s one of the upgrades that almost makes it worth it. You still get the full retro experience (well except for the actuator arm seeking sounds), but on the plus side you don’t have to worry about failing magnetic hard drives.
Well, this computer is too old for IDE (but see below). :) Looks like it's something called MFM, driven by an entire expansion card that hooks up to the hard drive. But I get what you mean. My oldest tower is running Windows 2000 (since it has a serial port on the motherboard, it comes in handy... for transferring files to/from the IBM PC.) and that has IDE so I could use that for MS-DOS as well (and would be able to run 90s DOS games etc), I'm sure, but with a ~20 year jump in technology (or about half way between the original IBM PC and today).
My first PC had an ST-225, and I'd like to confirm that it is indeed MFM. (I miss the gronky startup sounds from that thing.)
If you want to modernize the storage for that old PC, then Lo-tech is probably a good choice. They've got a wonderful all-in-one card that includes a mounting bracket, fits into an 8-bit ISA slot, and accepts a CF card directly: https://texelec.com/product/lo-tech-xt-cf-lite-rev-2/
File transfer can be done a number of different ways, including serial ports (USB to RS-232 adapters generally work fine), floppies (USB 3.5" floppy drives are awesome and cheap), and: Networking.
Around the turn of the century, I briefly had an already-old XT machine that had no hard drive, but it did have 10BASE2 Ethernet and Hercules-compatible graphics built into the motherboard.
It was a fun little adventure to get it online with my then-modern LAN and I did a number of unlikely things with it (including a graphical web browser), but the most practical thing it did was connect to a Samba share on my Linux box. It worked great. Old 8-bit network cards are not particularly expensive.
It all depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. :)
> Anyway, I could just be emulating it instead (lol).
Yeah I'm wondering about that too. I'd say there's something special about using the real thing: have the old hardware working.
Ideally in a 100% real time-capsule mode: say a Commodore Amiga back then didn't have a "Vampire 8000 GTX Turbo 16-valves" accelerator. My machines are all pristine time capsules, not polluted by modernity.
But as you wrote: at some point something fails. And what do you do then?
I understand the appeal of "fake IDE disks" and "fake floppy drives" etc. but if it's to use stuff emulating part of the real thing, why not just use an emulator emulating the entire real thing?
It's not a criticism: for example I've got a real vintage arcade cab and more often than not the "PCB" that's plugged in is not a vintage PCB (even though I've got several of those) but a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter. And once a game is launched, you can't tell the difference: it's basically cycle-perfect emulation.
Something something about the ship of theseus and all that.
Totally agreed. Related, I actually wrote a satirical blog post on the brilliant but equally frustrating experiences of playing King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella when I was a kid. Just call me Captain Ahab because I hated that damn whale...
As a kid who hadn't seen anything else, the mechanic of "save early, save often" made perfect sense to me (and I've always wished I had a similar mechanism IRL!), just as I imagine it did to the Sierra authors. And in fact I think there's a lot to like about it -- it's not "good game design", but imo it does provide stakes and a sense of danger in a way that the Lucasarts/etc stuff doesn't. But, yeah, a kid who's had more than passing experience with modern games certainly might not see it that way!
I’d probably add “Save Early, Save Often, Save Multiple.” because there are so many ways to accidentally softlock yourself making the game totally unwinnable without realizing it until hours later.
There’s a reason most of us as kids started out with descriptive save names like `INNKEEP.SAV` and `BUYSLED.SAV`, and then halfway through the playthrough it's just `1.SAV`, `2.SAV`, `3.SAV`, etc. :)
I tried getting my kids to play sierra games with me, and they seemed uninterested. What a bummer, as I have very fond memories of playing these games with my otherwise uninterested parents.
DeskMate in 1988 came with my family's first computer, a Tandy 2000 TX. One of the first mainstream consumer PCs with a 3.5" disk drive. (We had to later buy a 5.25" drive in order to share software--er, I mean data--with our neighbors.) DeskMate was marketed as, "Finally! No need to use complicated MS-DOS!" Of course, you couldn't _really_ use it for much, as MS-DOS programs of the time were much more powerful and interesting, but it was a nice tech demo I guess.
I just did something neat- I tried out the install of Windows 3.1, which has a version of Visual Basic installed. I created a small program in Visual Basic, with a window and some buttons to press, and then saved the program as an .exe (remember how easy this used to be! you could make your program and then just... save the executable out of VB! No compiler knowledge needed!)
I then saved this .exe to a disk image, and then saved that disk image back to my modern mac that I'm doing this on via downloading that in the browser.
I then took that .exe and the only dependency - vbrun100.dll - and put it on a floppy (a real one) and then took that floppy over to a vintage computer I have that has Windows 3.1 on it still (an old 25 MHz Intel486 DX industrial computer I have sitting in a closet with no real use for). Popped in the floppy, copied the .exe and .dll.
And ran the program, no problem! A real GUI windows program, made in VB running in Windows 3.1, inside an entire emulated machine in Javascript in a browser window running on an Apple Silicon macbook in 2026....
Exported and saved to disk and then ran without issue on a piece of hardware made in *1992*!
Now I need to do the reverse... make some software with a copy of VB installed on this old machine of mine and run it on my mac inside the browser.
Odds are good that EXE you made will run on 32-bit Windows 10, too.
Can run on modern 64-bit windows too with otvdm: https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
Yes, just tried this, and my little exe ran on a Windows 10 64 bit machine just fine.
Which means I just built a demo of a tiny 16 bit windows GUI applet, using emulated VB in Win 3.1 in a browser and got it to run on modern Windows in a shorter amount of time than it would have likely taken me to get the same type of demo up and running natively in Windows 10 today.
Those who consider every little JS framework, iPhone and AI iteration "revolutionary", go check the thing labeled "Visicalc (1981)" on this site to learn what a revolution looks like.
PS: Nine Princes in Amber was an interesting choice alongside the others!
VisiCalc Link: https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/app/other/visicalc/1981/
I have my IBM PC set up (to go through a Peter Norton assembly language book again) but I got a file read error for the first time recently on the 20 MB (Seagate ST-225) hard drive and parity errors from the RAM (again). I have chips (pretty cheap, industry standard chips) I can swap out to fix it hopefully. Anyway, I could just be emulating it instead (lol).
Cool, they have Exploring the IBM PC. It was a bootable disk with a tutorial to teach you how to use the computer (like what the scroll lock button was meant to do, and all the other keys on the original keyboard). I loaded up the CGA version on the CGA IBM PC emulator, which also plays music. The sound was cutting out though. In a later part (the Fun Writer) when you can turn on the "radio", the music seems to be missing the rests. I guess it's not perfect. The program always struck me as doing strange things with the hardware, so that might be why. (I'll have to look into some local emulators to try out. I really only need DOS for what I'm doing. I also have a MisterFPGA...)
I have a couple of enthusiast friends who use CompactFlash-to-IDE adapters, and that’s one of the upgrades that almost makes it worth it. You still get the full retro experience (well except for the actuator arm seeking sounds), but on the plus side you don’t have to worry about failing magnetic hard drives.
Also this looks pretty neat as well
https://picoide.com
Well, this computer is too old for IDE (but see below). :) Looks like it's something called MFM, driven by an entire expansion card that hooks up to the hard drive. But I get what you mean. My oldest tower is running Windows 2000 (since it has a serial port on the motherboard, it comes in handy... for transferring files to/from the IBM PC.) and that has IDE so I could use that for MS-DOS as well (and would be able to run 90s DOS games etc), I'm sure, but with a ~20 year jump in technology (or about half way between the original IBM PC and today).
Interestingly, https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_8-bit_IDE_Adapter_rev... or better yet https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_CompactFlash_Adap... looks like it would work if needed, and then using a CF to IDE adapter like you mentioned.
My first PC had an ST-225, and I'd like to confirm that it is indeed MFM. (I miss the gronky startup sounds from that thing.)
If you want to modernize the storage for that old PC, then Lo-tech is probably a good choice. They've got a wonderful all-in-one card that includes a mounting bracket, fits into an 8-bit ISA slot, and accepts a CF card directly: https://texelec.com/product/lo-tech-xt-cf-lite-rev-2/
File transfer can be done a number of different ways, including serial ports (USB to RS-232 adapters generally work fine), floppies (USB 3.5" floppy drives are awesome and cheap), and: Networking.
Around the turn of the century, I briefly had an already-old XT machine that had no hard drive, but it did have 10BASE2 Ethernet and Hercules-compatible graphics built into the motherboard.
It was a fun little adventure to get it online with my then-modern LAN and I did a number of unlikely things with it (including a graphical web browser), but the most practical thing it did was connect to a Samba share on my Linux box. It worked great. Old 8-bit network cards are not particularly expensive.
It all depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. :)
> Anyway, I could just be emulating it instead (lol).
Yeah I'm wondering about that too. I'd say there's something special about using the real thing: have the old hardware working.
Ideally in a 100% real time-capsule mode: say a Commodore Amiga back then didn't have a "Vampire 8000 GTX Turbo 16-valves" accelerator. My machines are all pristine time capsules, not polluted by modernity.
But as you wrote: at some point something fails. And what do you do then?
I understand the appeal of "fake IDE disks" and "fake floppy drives" etc. but if it's to use stuff emulating part of the real thing, why not just use an emulator emulating the entire real thing?
It's not a criticism: for example I've got a real vintage arcade cab and more often than not the "PCB" that's plugged in is not a vintage PCB (even though I've got several of those) but a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter. And once a game is launched, you can't tell the difference: it's basically cycle-perfect emulation.
Something something about the ship of theseus and all that.
A somewhat relative list of in-browser VMs https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/6379649c0cbade9abc02b242...
You'll want to turn down your speakers for a few of these. I did not find any volume knob in time for Dune II to finish booting, unfortunately.
I know I could've done this at any time, but I cannot wait to sit my kids down in front of full-screen Oregon Trail and King's Quest experiences.
Be cautious with this. My firstborn's first complete sentence was "King Graham fell" (from the sledding scene in King's Quest V).
Oregon Trail held up well but, man, Kings Quest is brutal with the killing you and having to start over.
Totally agreed. Related, I actually wrote a satirical blog post on the brilliant but equally frustrating experiences of playing King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella when I was a kid. Just call me Captain Ahab because I hated that damn whale...
https://mordenstar.com/blog/kqiv
As a kid who hadn't seen anything else, the mechanic of "save early, save often" made perfect sense to me (and I've always wished I had a similar mechanism IRL!), just as I imagine it did to the Sierra authors. And in fact I think there's a lot to like about it -- it's not "good game design", but imo it does provide stakes and a sense of danger in a way that the Lucasarts/etc stuff doesn't. But, yeah, a kid who's had more than passing experience with modern games certainly might not see it that way!
I’d probably add “Save Early, Save Often, Save Multiple.” because there are so many ways to accidentally softlock yourself making the game totally unwinnable without realizing it until hours later.
There’s a reason most of us as kids started out with descriptive save names like `INNKEEP.SAV` and `BUYSLED.SAV`, and then halfway through the playthrough it's just `1.SAV`, `2.SAV`, `3.SAV`, etc. :)
https://archive.org/details/MECC_A157_v11_4amCrack
I tried getting my kids to play sierra games with me, and they seemed uninterested. What a bummer, as I have very fond memories of playing these games with my otherwise uninterested parents.
Would love to see Tandy DeskMate on here!
DeskMate in 1988 came with my family's first computer, a Tandy 2000 TX. One of the first mainstream consumer PCs with a 3.5" disk drive. (We had to later buy a 5.25" drive in order to share software--er, I mean data--with our neighbors.) DeskMate was marketed as, "Finally! No need to use complicated MS-DOS!" Of course, you couldn't _really_ use it for much, as MS-DOS programs of the time were much more powerful and interesting, but it was a nice tech demo I guess.
Dune II, Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen - all games I used to play. Very nice!
So many goosebumps going down memory lane.
Related:
Tiny Emulators
https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884395)