Why are you going to support such old operation systems?

[asmwarrior]

This project is great.

Those operation systems such as windows 3.11 are very old. I think nobody is using such computers.

So I'm curious about your aim. Thanks.

[adbrt]

Thank you! I think that this is mostly a hobbyist thing and a challenge of some kind, there actually are quite a bit of people using old systems for fun if you look into communities like vogons.org, AmiBay, there are even youtube channels with millions of views on videos about old computers. There are contests on creative use of old hardware. That's some kind of digital archeology, treating these things as cultural heritage of modern times.

I have quite a lot of 20+ year old industrial single board computers and some portable PCs, they don't take much space in storage, sometimes it's fun to turn them on and try doing anything useful with them. I actually really dislike working with ancient tools like Visual Studio 1.52 or Borland C++ Builder 1.0 and using stuff like that is a complete waste of time, so I wanted to solve a problem of supporting such old systems "once for all" and just spend some time on creating an efficient way of developing applications that would work on ancient systems.

Long-term I am also thinking about converting these old computers into retro-game consoles that can be plugged into TV (with some hardware modifications - HDMI converters, wireless controllers, 3D printed cases etc.), and I will need to develop some ways of loading games into these machines over network, or remote controlling these machines, and that's where a workflow that allows building apps both for modern and legacy systems would be mostly helpful. Again, this is just a hobby, so it may take years before I actually do anything useful, but at least I have some tools now.

[asmwarrior]

Thanks for the detailed response. I understand now. Happy hacking!

BTW: I never known the VOGONS and AmiBay before. It is interesting, I also have some old PCs which are more than 10 years old.

[aabluedragon]

I believe that project has its use cases.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of NukemNet, a multiplayer launcher for legacy games.
I used Electron and JavaScript libs to make it.
The upside is that modern dev tools and JavaScript are highly productive and well supported.
Downside is, I can't support systems like windows XP/9x/3.11/DOS.
I wish I know about your project back then when I started, I hope you keep maintaining it, I'll keep an eye on it just in case I decide to do a re-write of NukemNet.

[MichaelAgarkov]

Supporting old hardware is always good. Intentionally doing the opposite is always bad.