Emulation

This is mostly an informational PSA for anyone struggling to get Windows 3.11 working in modern versions of QEMU. Yeah, I know, not exactly a massively viral target audience.

Anyway, short answer, use QEMU 5.2.0 from December 2020 to run Windows 3.11 from November 1993.

An innocent beginning

I made a harmless jokey reply to a toot from Thom at OSNews, lamenting the lack of native Mastodon client for Windows 3.11.

I wrote previously about debugging a broken x16emu snap. In short, something went wonky with ld. I started a thread on the snapcraft forum and Ken VanDine came to my assistance with an answer and a pull request.

I grabbed that pr, and it did indeed build successfully..

$ snapcraft --use-lxd
Launching instance...
Executed: pull alsa-pulseaudio
Executed: pull gnome/sdk
Executed: pull x16-roms
Executed: pull x16-emulator
Executed: build alsa-pulseaudio
Executed: build gnome/sdk
Executed: build x16-roms
Executed: skip pull x16-roms (already ran)
Executed: skip build x16-roms (already ran)
Executed: stage x16-roms (required to build 'x16-emulator')
Executed: skip pull alsa-pulseaudio (already ran)
Executed: skip build alsa-pulseaudio (already ran)
Executed: stage alsa-pulseaudio (required to build 'x16-emulator')
Executed: build x16-emulator
Executed: skip stage alsa-pulseaudio (already ran)
Executed: stage gnome/sdk
Executed: skip stage x16-roms (already ran)
Executed: stage x16-emulator
Executed: prime alsa-pulseaudio
Executed: prime gnome/sdk
Executed: prime x16-roms
Executed: prime x16-emulator
Executed parts lifecycle
Generated snap metadata
Created snap package x16emu_b16509b_amd64.snap  

Even better, it’s smaller. The build I had in the store was 6MB in size:

I thought I’d “live blog” (not live) my way through fixing a snap which I noticed was broken this morning. How did I notice? I happened to look at the build page for it. Maybe my spidey sense was tingling, because I wouldn’t ordinarily have zoned in on this particular snap.

I could have some kind of alert that lets me know when this happens, but I currently don’t. I might use my new-found love of GitHub Actions, but that sounds like a future blog post!