Run Windows 1.01 in your browser

[mambodog]

As there seems to be a lot of interest in emulators in the browser, here's my effort: I ported an emulator for classic Mac and IBM PC to the browser.

Mac System 7 Demo: http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/

Windows 3.0 Demo: http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ibmpc-win/

IBM PC doesn't have mouse support... Yet. For Mac OS it's writing the mouse position directly into memory, but I've yet to add that hack for Windows.

[mbrubeck]

Wow, awesome! For the Mac one with mouse support, you might want to add ".emscripten { cursor: none; }" to your stylesheet so the host cursor doesn't cover up the emulated one.

[allochthon]

The Mac is great -- just as I remember it when I was a little kid. Actually, not exactly -- the emulator seems faster than the Mac we had. Also, I tried to get it to crash but wasn't able to.

[benjy1]

Pretty cool, any chance they might end up on Github?

[ximeng]

Awesome, can play gorillas in qbasic :D

[DanBC]

I am really enjoying a lot of the retro things being posted recently. Sadly, they miss out some of the details. Like Elite being playable at 4 MHz, but really hard at 25 MHz, because that's how clocks worked then, and that's what the turbo button did. (It was a de-turbo button, turning your machine into a slow machine for compatibility. If it was connected, that is.)

And this makes me wonder about the Wayback machine. I can retrieve an old web page, but can I recreate the experience of posting to that site? Is anyone archiving the various social network sites code, so that the Future People can recreate the experience of Friendster or Facebook or Myspace? Or are the Future People going to have to guess by looking at screenshots and videos?

One of the first (perhaps the first?) commercial games for Windows was "Balance of Power". I think it either came with a weird runtime version of Win 1.0, or a voucher to get it, for people running dos.

http://theodor.lauppert.ws/games/bop.htm

[guyzero]

it came with an embedded windows runtime - I think it was Microsoft not sure quite yet how they'd license it.

[frozenport]

>><machine id="ibm5160" class="pcjs" border="1" width="980px" pos="center" style="background-color:#FAEBD7">

Tag of the future

[jcutrell]

Indeed.

What I might coin the "cloud tag".

[pud]

Every time I see an emulator like this on HN, my mind is blown.

Can someone explain to me and any other run-of-the-mill hackers reading this, how an emulator like this is made?

I wouldn't even know where to start.

[ghc]

Played Reversi in Windows 1.01. Still lost. I will go hang my head in shame now.

[NamTaf]

The first time I ran this something went wrong I somehow didn't manage to even boot in to windows but found myself at the command line, with only the DOS floppy disks available.

The true Windows 1.01 experience.

[ldite]

  C:
  CD windows
  win

[stormbrew]

I love that windows 1.x had a tiling window manager. I think it's kind of a shame that mode died for so long.

[brudgers]

Back in Windows 8. And improved in Windows 8.1.

EMACS, of course, never lost it.

[bluedino]

The overlapping technology wasn't there. Tiling wasn't a 'feature' ;)

[jaxbot]

All these features, and Reversi! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk

[mintplant]

Even better, Zork: http://jsmachines.net/disks/pc/games/infocom/zork1/

And it appears to save your state between runs, which is nice.

[Pitarou]

So that's:

1. Zork

2. running in the Infocom Virtual Machine

3. running in an IBM PC emulator

4. running in Javascript

6. running in x86 machine code

and x86 maintains backwards compatibility with that original IBM PC through

7. hardware instruction set translation

It's nice to know all those transistors aren't sitting idle.

[tzury]

After Bellard's JSLinux, it was just about time till more OS will be ported to JS.

http://bellard.org/jslinux/

[slacka]

After PCjs and Bellard's, try Virtual x86, which can emulate FreeDOS, OpenBSD, and KolibriOS.

http://copy.sh/v24/

As a hack, all of these JavaScript emulators are awesome to play with. But in reality if you need performance for something in the past decade, like a N64 or newer arcade emulators, JS is still orders of magnitude slower than dynarec emulators written in C. I hope something like PNaCl will come along to bridge the performance gap.

[fosk]

This an insanely great emulation. Including the loading times.

[dmead]

the mouse tracking is fucked. it leaves the windows if i go to try and click the top right corner

[timmclean]

It'd be nice if they implemented Pointer Lock: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAPI/Pointer_Lock

[randomhunt]

Yeah I had the same, I figured out it was more the acceleration that was the problem rather than the cursor movement itself...moving slower than usual meant I could use it without problems.

[netpenthe]

about as good as vmware :)

[ma2rten]

I had the same problem in chrome on Mac, but it works fine on firefox.

[csmatt]

As someone who really enjoys the history of computing, this is awesome! I don't think I've ever had a chance to play with Win 1 and probably wouldn't have gone through the trouble of getting it running myself. This and others like it would be neat for the Computer History Museum to have on its site.

[conradfr]

I can't seem to successfully reset the calculator after a divide by zero.

It's funny how when I closed Windows and ended on the DOS prompt I mindlessly typed "win" & enter. Some habits never die I guess.

[anonymfus]

"C" key works for me as expected, where is problem?

[adamjernst]

Windows 1.01 feels much closer to Mac Classic than Windows 3.1 does. (Button appearance, close button on left, menus must be held down to stay open, "Get Info" instead of "Properties".)

[obfuskater]

It's really mind blowing how it's written entirely in javascript

[marshray]

Wow, it had been a long time since I'd played DONKEY.BAS. http://jsmachines.net/demos/pc/donkey/

[tanzam75]

Bill Gates and Neil Konzen wrote DONKEY.BAS. His name doesn't show up in the program listing, though, even on PC-DOS 1.0. :-(

[crb]

Interesting to see Helvetica ("Helv") in Windows 1.0 Write. According to a quick Wikipedia, Arial was only introduced with TrueType in Windows 3.x.

[quarterto]

It's actually MS Sans Serif not even trying to hide the fact it's a ripoff. It's still in Windows 7 (don't know about 8), along with a TrueType version. Major differences between MS Sans Serif and Helvetica are the uppercase R and G. The overall typeface has a little more vertical stress. It's a way better ripoff than Arial; it's a shame Arial became so ubiquitous in that capacity.

[jmhain]

I tried to unmaximize a window by dragging the title bar like in Windows 7 or GNOME 3. I have no idea why I expected that to work.

[Pitarou]

Were you confused by the dead mouse scroll wheel, too? Or was that just me?

[mrbuttons454]

I still suck at Reversi. :(