Windows 3.1 Games Are Now Just a Click Away

If air traffic control at one of Europe's busiest airports still runs on Windows 3.1, surely the antiquated but sturdy operating system is good enough for the rest of us. The Internet Archive must agree, because today it announced that more than 1,000 classic Windows 3.x software titles will run in your browser window.

That's right, you can now re-live the 1990s computing experience. The interface is similar to IA's other DOS browser emulator, which arrived last year. Once you've chosen a program to run from the list (which is mostly games) your browser will load the emulator, take over your cursor, and voila! You're running Windows 3.0.

We tested a few classic titles like Wheel of Fortune and Roulette, which work exactly the way we remember them, right down to the hairstyles and horn-rimmed glasses of the contestants. There are also some productivity titles available--amortization and graphing calculators, for instance--as well as utilities, including a rudimentary file compression app.

To offer an opportunity to get your feet wet (or to jog your memory if you used Windows 3.0 back when it was cutting edge), IA offers a curated collection of software. Unfortunately, Oregon Trail, Pac Man, and other titles we looked forward to playing the most are not available, presumably because they're not open source.

The emulator is open-source; it's actually a Java-based adaptation of DOSBOX that converts Windows runtimes into JavaScript code your browser can understand. Engadget notes that it has also been tested to boot successfully into Windows 95, so perhaps IA will follow up with a Windows 95 software collection.

Earlier this week, the Internet Archive launched the Malware Museum, a collection of programs—mostly viruses—distributed on home computers in the 1980s and '90s. "Once they infected a system, they would sometimes show animation or messages that you had been infected," the website's description said, so if that's your thing, check it out.