ReactOS is a moving target because it tracks current Windows (for better or for worse.)
Something targeting 16-bit Windows would be easier since the official API has been frozen since 1992 (with a few additions for thunking added in Windows 95 - but that's really only for interacting with 32-bit libraries and programs.) The target is fixed in stone, as it were. There's no need to worry about porting to 64-bit or implementing the behaviors of Windows 11 or what-have-you. It's unchanged I'm I've been looking at the work needed to do so and most of it seems to lie in properly recreating the KERNEL and possibly GDI module(s). There is a book, "Windows Internals: Implementing the Windows Operating Environment" that does a good job of describing the Windows 3.1 kernel (and some other things), and can be paired with "Undocumented Windows: A Programmer's Guide to Reserved Microsoft Windows API Functions" (the Andrew Schulman books) as a companion text (Windows Internals itself recommends this book in the preface.) Drivers can be sourced from DDK examples or just plain use existing driver binaries. As for the references to NT 3.51, I'm pretty sure you're referencing MVDM/WOW16/KERNEL31, which is the WOWified Windows 3.1 kernel source. I'm aware of it and it doesn't take a lawyer to tell you that this is "don't even look, much less touch." Of course, a competent copyright lawyer would dispense the same advice. Any project that involves THAT code in ANY way is committing legal suicide and inviting Microsoft to destroy them in court (barring MS relicensing said source.) If I'm to get anywhere in such an endeavor, I need to avoid such things entirely. On Sat, Jun 8, 2024, 16:50 Ralf Quint via Freedos-devel < freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > On 6/3/2024 2:53 PM, Kirn Gill via Freedos-devel wrote: > > Does anyone here have any experience with systems programming for > > 16-bit (DOS-based) versions of Windows? > > > > Do you know of a good forum? > > > > Has anyone attempted to clone Windows 3.x in the same way as ReactOS? > > No. And it is doubtful that anyone ever seriously tried. ReactOS started > as a Windows 95 clone and was (and kind of still is) always a moving > target ever since. And not sure if anyone would ever try and pick this > up as a task, too many programmers these days are too lazy to be > bothered to develop anything for 16bit, you can even see this in the > contributions for FreeDOS.... > > > Ralf > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel >
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