I haven't seen this posted, but MS has released the source to some early versions of DOS and Word.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/03/25/microsoft-makes-source-code-for-ms-dos-and-word-for-windows-available-to-public.aspx

Not sure I have a comment on this, but it's a shame that Win 3.1 isn't being included as that would be huge for the purposes of retaining access to older games and programs that were for Windows of that Vintage.

Still, this is a rather significant thing for history buffs, even if version 4 was much more used.

I think over 90% of DOS games work in DOSbox. Having the source code may help them but then again it may not (it depends exactly why those games are broken).

In terms of broken games I think it's usually the Windows 9x ones that cause the most problems. WINE is often good for these but there is no WINE for Windows, unfortunatley.

In the days of DOS 2.0 (the newest one there), a lot of games were PC booters, not DOS games. I don't think the DOSBox people will be able to gain much from this (other than perhaps ensuring various corner cases are replicated faithfully), so the compatibilty is probably not going to be affected much from this.

The best thing for gaming would really be if Microsoft released 3.1x as a free download...

Many remaining DOSBox issues are due to expected behaviour of the hardware rather than the operating system, so this source release doesn't necessarily mean it will lead to DOSBox compatibility improvements.

They accidentally released it while releasing the source code for how to build Egyptian pyramids!

Cool news, thanks for sharing.

To go along with hedwards' comment about Windows, I've long dreamed of a "WinBox" for running windows 3.1, 95, and even 98. Some people use a virtual machine for those, which works just as well, but I think the main issue is that to use a VM you still need an old license or install disc.

I figure that since Microsoft no longer produces, sells, or supports copies of Win 3.1/95/98 (unless I'm mistaken), it wouldn't be any kind of financial loss to them. Maybe they could make a WinBox that essentially bypasses the license requirement without revealing source code or anything like that.

Just some thoughts...perhaps I shall convert to Linux one day and use WINE.

Of course there should be games on Steam that make use of it!

I mean, surely that was the digital distributor you had in mind, right? I can't possibly think of another distributor that would have any use for Windows 3.1...

I guess if you had one that specialized in good old games, they might be interested too... they'd probably be called something like Excellent Classic Gaming... but that's not a thing, is it?

;)

Anybody here have any luck getting Word 1.1a to compile on DOSBox?

I get as far until csl gives an error working on debugcmd about running out of memory :(