Oooh, neat. I’ve been told OpenWatcom can actually produce the correct format binaries, but its headers are just too new to actually get something working, combined with sheer magic in the vanilla Windows C library that just makes it hard.

I do wonder if those early MSC disks will ever show up …

There are days where it pays to drink coffee before answering the question >.<;

What I was thinking of anything that covers up WinMain, requiring to get the cmdline via GetCommandLine()

You have the answer in front of you. In WinMain, the parameter “LPSTR lpszCmdLine;” is a Long Pointer to a Strtring terminanted in null that returns the command line.

That might be true with hand written assembly or Pascal applications. I used MSC4.0 for this and didn’t modify any of the source code or resulting binaries aside from the MARK command.

I’d actually expect that behavior though from the few programs that were shipped as Windows runtime like PageMaker which simply included a stripped down Windows 1.0 on the disk. I’d have to check the VM, the headers and the docs, but I’m not certain if Win 1.0 has the concept of CLI switches or the APIs to handle them.

Seems my recollection is wrong as Fixds says that windows does fix the function prolog when the data segment moves which makes sense otherwise every exported function would require makeprocinstance.

I’d have to dig into the SDK documents, but anything declared as EXPORT (aka, old __dllexport) should automatically get registered; a lot of documents I read state that MakeProcInstance isn’t required in that case. You are right that DLLs on 16-bit Windows are a *special* beast though.

Granted, you might still need to MakeProcInstance there if you’re calling a non-exported symbol.

WineVDM is an add-on software. I’m aware of it, but one could write add-on software to run OS/2 applications under Linux (Twine project). This is what Windows 32-bit does out of the box. I do think the reasoning on removing NTVDM is kinda poor, but I did want to demonstrate this compatibility was like with what you get in the box.

I also don’t count resource conversion because again because it’s conceptually no different than hex editing and replacing components of the original software. Both of these things are legit ways to run old Windows software, but the point here was demonstrating what worked as is.