Oldest GUI utility that also runs on Windows 11 · enlyth

For some time I’ve been questioning a couple of foolish query, which is, what’s the oldest utility with a GUI that can nonetheless run on Windows 11 with out modifications or emulation.

Given Windows’ glorious backwards compatibility, I anticipated the reply to be one thing impressively previous.

Sadly, Windows 11 can’t run 16-bit Windows packages by itself, as a result of 64-bit Windows has no NTVDM, so we’re going to have to search out one thing from the early NT period.

I keep in mind asking this query some time in the past on an nameless discussion board, the place somebody pointed me to Win32s, and prompt to search out an early launch model of it with FREECELL.exe.

So I did precisely that, and lo and behold, FREECELL.EXE with a date modified of 22-Feb-93 working and totally playable, with none modifications on the most recent model of Windows 11:

At the time of this publish, that’s a 33 years and eight months previous utility, which is impressively virtually as previous as me.

So I kinda thought “cool”, thought of this a solved thriller and forgot about it shortly afterwards. But for some motive, this query popped into my thoughts once more recently and this time I made a decision to dig deeper to see if I can discover one thing older.

Digging by means of previous Windows variations on the Internet Archive, I discovered some early NT 3.1 pre-release variations that appeared promising, however the primary subject gave the impression to be both incompatibility with at the moment’s executable format or API modifications that got here later in growth.

The earliest 1991 variations used a draft PE format not suitable with trendy Windows, and builds as much as mid-1992 assumed the cdecl calling conference as a substitute of stdcall for Windows API calls, so arguments would get eliminated twice, as such:

push hwnd          ; 4 bytes of args
name [ShowWindow]  ; Win11 ShowWindow is stdcall, ends with "ret 4" and removes them
add  esp, 4        ; the 1992 caller removes them once more

Which would understandably trigger this system to crash.

There was one utility that caught my eye although, from Build 347, and that was CDPLAYER.EXE, linked on 16-Nov-1992. By then the calling conference was fastened, however the different packages in that construct crash of their bundled C runtime. CDPLAYER.EXE avoids that by utilizing the system’s crtdll.dll, and Windows 11 nonetheless ships a crtdll.dll in SysWOW64.

If you begin this system, you get one thing like this:

That is as a result of, duh, my pc doesn’t have a CD-ROM drive. But you should use a small DLL (cdemu.dll) to emulate one with some faux audio information and truly get it to play audio:

Pretty cool for a program that’s virtually 34 years previous!

So earlier I discussed that 16-bit packages are out of the image as a result of they’re not supported.

But in order for you, you should use one thing like otvdm to run older Windows functions.

Behold, a totally playable model of REVERSI.EXE dated 15-Nov-1985 working on Windows 11, taken from Windows 1.01:

And though utilizing otvdm does really feel like dishonest, I assumed it was cool sufficient to incorporate on this publish.