Programming for Windows 9x?

[archIvarIus3k]

Which language and development/compiler tools (preferably open-source) would be better (easier to learn, consuming less resources) for person, who knows nothing about programming (me)?

I have interest in creating several apps, which will be useful for me in Windows 9x, because apps i want don't exist, or requires newer systems, and i also won't loosing time for transferring files between host and VM so much as i need.

At least smth like HashTab/OpenHashTab, but for Windows 95-ME (with MD5, SHA-1 and maybe some other checksums). Further maybe i make smth else.

Also where i can get useful info (books, discs and so on) about learning language stuff, old winapi, checksums and other useful things?

Edited January 25, 2024 by archIvarIus3k

[jaclaz]

If you are completely new about programming, and if it is for 9x I would advice you look into Delphi (basically what everyone else does NOT use).

There are lots of (old, which in this case means good) books and manuals for the language that you can find used/second hand and - once you become familiar with it - you can still use your acquired knowledge using Lazarus (which is open source but only early version of it are Windows 9x/Me compatible) on newer OSes.

I am not a programmer (at the most I can manage to half-@§§edly put together some scripts) and C and its variants (which are the alternative) are (to me at least) completely incomprehensible, Delphi is usually at least readable.

For simple programs it is probably not worth the effort and I would go for some simpler environments, such as Autoit, up to 3.2.something it was windows 95 compatible.

jaclaz

 

[Drugwash]

You may get a few different replies here, each person may have their own favorite languages and tools.
For me it has been AutoHotkey - derived years ago from AutoIt, mentioned above by @jaclaz. It's an interpreted, macro language, single-threaded so it has a few limitations in terms of speed, but it all depends on your goals. I've built my own tools years ago, and I still use a couple of them today under Linux Mint. So the language is pretty resilient at least for small scopes.

If you decide to try it you should choose only version 1.0, which is the only one that can run on Win9x systems. It comes with its Help file - which is pretty well done but not exhaustive - and also its own compiler if you want to convert the scripts to executables. But on a machine with AHK installed correctly scripts can run as is, so one doesn't have to compile them everytime in order to test or run them. That's a plus when it comes to quick development.

Incidentally I had already built a small tool that can compute hashes; it's geared towards media (video) files but file types are editable, it can basically compute hashes (MD5 and SHA1 only) for any file type. It's called StorageMediaCatalog and it can be found in the large package linked to in my signature below. Hope the Dropbox repository is still reachable.

Good luck!

Edited October 16, 2024 by Drugwash
fixed a small insignifiant typo

[Dixel]

9x? LUA, of course! Absolutely no question. The simplest tool for starting learning from scratch.

"Lua is a powerful and fast programming language that is easy to learn and use and to embed into your application. Lua is designed to be a lightweight embeddable scripting language. It is used for all sorts of applications, from games to web applications and image processing."

https://www.lua.org/start.html

[Dixel]

The oldest version in the repository goes as far as May, 1994. One of the most important things, it's still being actively supported and developed, even as of today!

https://www.lua.org/ftp/

[Dixel]

Building Lua from source on Windows, very detailed instructions on Wiki.

http://lua-users.org/wiki/BuildingLuaInWindowsForNewbies

[D.Draker]

Don't forget to use Scite as the most convenient editing tool.

[pangoomis]

Try older versions of wxWidgets - 2.9.5/3.0.5.

Also look here: https://glizda.wordpress.com/2021/05/19/compiling-programs-for-windows-95-and-pentium-in-2021/ (though this is mostly relevant for Win95 support specifically, Win98/SE/ME gives you more options)

For proper Win9x development, sooner or later you won't be able to escape Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0/Visual Studio 2005.

Edited February 14, 2024 by MrMateczko

[Gansangriff]

What about Freebasic? This seems to be the programming language of choice to make DOS compatible software that can run on current systems as well.

[ABCDEFG]

wxDev-C++

Versions 6 and 7 are the last compatible with 9x systems.

https://archive.org/details/wxdevcpp_7/

 

And it seems that one thing went mostly unnoticed, Borland C++ Builder 1.0 is now free.

https://blogs.embarcadero.com/celebrating-25-years-of-cbuilder/

https://cc.embarcadero.com/item/30934

 

 

It produces relatively small executable files with a small number of dependencies - only 6 dlls.

 

 

And after applying the UPX compressor, the executable file is only 100KB.

 

Edited April 7 by ABCDEFG
Update

[archIvarIus3k]

Thanks for all your replies, i'll check this stuff later.

[Damaniel]

If I was going to create a 9x app these days (my own retrodev projects are all DOS-based so this hasn't come up), I'd probably go with Delphi, or in the open source case, Lazarus.  Either are easily obtained, there's plenty of documentation out there and since Lazarus and Delphi are compatible enough, most of the documentation for either will generally apply to both, and Lazarus still supports modern PCs (as does Delphi, but it's very expensive) so the skill set is transferable if you want to write software for new PCs.

[adamgreenhello34]

On 9/2/2024 at 1:40 AM, Damaniel said:

I've been more focused on retro development for DOS, but if I were to create a 9x app, Delphi or Lazarus would definitely be solid options. The compatibility between them and the abundance of documentation make them practical choices to convert vb6 to c#, especially with Lazarus supporting modern PCs affordably.

I've been more focused on retro development for DOS, but if I were to create a 9x app, Delphi or Lazarus would definitely be solid options. The compatibility between them and the abundance of documentation make them practical choices, especially with Lazarus supporting modern PCs affordably.

Edited February 3 by adamgreenhello34

[CamTron]

Surprised nobody mentioned Visual Basic 6.0 yet. Back in the day, that's what coding beginners used to make simple apps, and it's an easy language to learn. Delphi is another great option, though Object Pascal language isn't used much outside of Delphi these days.

If you want to get serious with programming, you should eventually learn C and C++. The Windows API is a C API, but it's quite low level, so not recommended for beginners. Microsoft created a few wrapper APIs like MFC and WTL to make things simpler, though.

Believe it or not, the latest Visual Studio still supports writing C# apps that target .NET 2.0 and will run on Windows 98. However, running such an app on 98 requires installing the massive .NET framework which is annoying if all you need it for is a simple program.