> > Something targeting 16-bit Windows would be easier since the official API has > been frozen since 1992
Are you sure it would be easier? Especially reimplementing Win 3.1 enhanced mode would be very hard to implement, I think. To my knowledge, we do not have a working open source DOS task switcher yet, capable of switching between "multiple DOS sessions", or is there one? To me, this the "main feature" of Windows 3.1 :) > > 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. > Do not forget USER.EXE. To my knowledge, much of the windowing and controls stuff is implemented in it. Perhaps as a "proof-of-concept" one could restrict to a real mode only, single program runtime facility. There, things like the dynamic linker and loader for NE executables / DLLs etc. and other basic KERNEL, GDI and USER functions could be implemented and tested. Regarding the NE loader, that could potentially be interesting to other DOS application programmers, giving them the possibility to use DLLs etc. Thanks for the book references! Bernd _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
