Cello, the first web browser for Windows

I just noticed that the original homepage for the Cello WWW browser is no longer online. So I put it up for download and brushed up a mirror of the Cello website that I had created years ago. Some images still were linked with absolute URLs and one page was missing. That’s fixed now.

Cello was the first browser for Windows. It was developed by Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. Lawyers typically had PCs with Windows in their offices, but no version of Mosaic for Windows was released until September 1993. Cello beat it by three months. Actually Cello was more than just a web browser. It supported other protocols like FTP, Telnet, and the then still rather important Gopher. It could send emails and read newsgroups.

Nowadays it is not of much practical use any more. It won’t start unless it finds Winsock software, so it is not fit for an HTML reader on an unconnected old PC or on a Windows installation on DOSBox. It runs well under XP (better than Mosaic, which tends to crash quickly) but often will be unable to connect to a given server, and of course it could only display very old or very simple websites correct anyway.

One thing that has always fascinated me about it is its very uncommon style sheet. It uses larger fonts than other browsers, and it uses lots of colors. Lists are displayed in red, headers are maroon, navy, or blue depending on rank. Links, on the other hand, have no separate color, and have a dashed border instead of being underlined. Unordered lists have custom bitmaps for bullets. Horizontal rules are black, solid and rather thick. The cursors are uncommon too, cross hair is the default, over links it changes to an up arrow, and the busy cursor is a square with three borders and the word “NET” within.

I have created a style sheet that reproduces the way Cello displayed web pages fairly well. I had to compromise a bit with the cursors, but the colors and fonts should all be correct, it even ignores the center tag and leaves a lot of space at the bottom of the page just like the original. I used it as an alternate style sheet on Astoria (the computer and DOS sections still have it), and I took the liberty to add it to my mirror of the Cello website, so that it looks as if it were viewed in the browser it presents.

Palette on Windows 2.0 with 256 colors

Palette is a small program that runs on everything from Windows 2.0 to XP and does nothing but show 125 colors, dithered or solid, depending on the environment. I’ve taken screenshots on various Windows versions under different settings and posted them in The Colors of Windows. Here’s a new one, on Windows 2.0 with Paradise 256 colors drivers:

Note again that Windows 2.0 can take advantage of the full 256-color palette. Under 3.x, you need a desktop setting of at least 32k colors for undithered display.

Windows 2.0 with 256 colors

For Paradise SVGA cards, which are emulated in DOSBox, there are drivers that allow running Windows 2.0 either at 640×400×256 or at 800×600×16. You can find them here, download PVGA16-2.ZIP. Here are two screenshots of Windows 2.0 running with 256 colors:

The Duff Software about screen

A speciality of the Duff Software games (I don’t think the label was ever used for anything else) was the about screen. It was accessed through the button in the top left corner of the window (under 32-bit Windows, that’s the small icon). It always looked like the one above: Icon, name of the game, the handles of the developers, Duff Software copyright notice, and three buttons labels Help, Preferences, and OK. The last one would simply close the screen.

This made a menu bar unnecessary. None of the original games have one, only their later Entertainment Pack instances. Obviously this type of interface was too non-standard for Microsoft. The only function not covered by the about screen, New Game, is usually handled by a button on the playing field, sometimes simply by clicking anywhere on the playing field.

Windows 95 on DOSBox

A couple of days ago I did it: I installed Windows 95 on DOSBox. There’s a very good guide how to do it, to which I have nothing to add. Just a few personal notes on my experiences.

In short: It works, and it can be useful, but it doesn’t work very well. Windows 3.1 runs nearly perfect meanwhile, it doesn’t need a boot disk but can run on DOSBox’s DOS, and only very rarely there is a game that won’t run on such an installation (Runner is an example).

Windows 95 on the other hand gives a nice gallery of error messages. I can’t even open the Control Panel. Every time I try to I get this:

Another drawback is that it’s impossible to mount a folder as an additional hard drive, since Windows has to boot from the image file and the mount command is not available. It’s not a real problem, but you’ll have to use WinImage or a similar program to move files to and from the image file. Just make sure it’s large enough for everything (mine is 400MB).

Nevertheless it does come in useful. K/oS Othello 97 for example came as an installer that wouldn’t run on XP, but ran on the DOSBox installation. With YA-zee, the same is true for the game itself. So it’s a useful thing to have, but not a replacement for an actual computer running Windows 95 or 98.

Bypassing Windows installers

Many installers from the second half of the 90s on are just self-extracting archives with a setup utility and a cab file. Usually you can open the archive and the cab file in WinRAR. Do not start a program directly out of the cab file if it contains Visual Basic 5 or 6 runtimes. Some of these files need to be registered, and having them accessed in a temporary location will screw up the registration.

Many games of the Windows 3.x era come as a setup utility and all the necessary files in compressed format, with the last letter of the extension replaced by an underscore. These can be expanded with Microsoft’s EXPAND utility, which has been part of every Windows distribution at least since 3.1. EXPAND is somewhere in the path, usually in the Windows directory I think, so you can access it from anywhere. But you have to know what the missing letter is, which is in some cases not obvious. There is usually a SETUP.INI or similar file with a complete file list.

As for the InstallShield installers, I know of no way to bypass them and don’t know if it’s possible at all.

A word about installers

Personally, I hate installers. Installers for DOS games are usually quite harmless, and I don’t mind them much. Their main function tends to be compression, some sort of proprietary compression that often actually makes the download smaller than the RARed game directory would be. The only thing that can be annoying about DOS installers is when they won’t run under DOSBox when the game itself would.

But with Windows they really get annoying. You never know what they do, they might modify something you might not want to be modified. They come with DLLs you already have, sometimes overwriting newer versions with older ones. I like to play Windows games directly out of the archive, something WinRAR allows. In some extreme case the installer is 32-bit only while the game itself is 16-bit!

Windows in DOSBox: Set it to 256 colors

When you install Windows 3.0 or 3.1 in DOSBox, always be sure to get an SVGA driver and set it to at least 256 colors. If you run it in VGA mode, the palette will be wrong. The bright colors will be correct, but the dark colors will be too light and of the wrong hue. Here’s a screenshot of Windows 3.0 running on DOSBox in VGA mode:

Five Windows 3.1 games with exceptional 16-color graphics

New York, New York is based on a simple concept, Towers of Hanoi. In this implementation you have to disassemble and reassemble the Statue of Liberty. (Makes you think of Keynesian job creation, doesn’t it?) The graphics aren’t overly detailed, but get an astonishing amount of atmosphere out of the Windows palette.

Destroyer for Windows is based on another simple concept, Battleship. Graphics not only show a lot of love for detail, they are functional as well: The hits your fleet takes are shown on the ships at the bottom of the screen.

I was a bit hesitant here: While it’s still impressive, the developers of WallBall did screw up a bit, and the graphics don’t display as they should under a 16-color setting. But it’s still impressive, it still sticks out.

MatchUp won’t make you say, wow, I didn’t think that could be done, but it’s still a very good usage of the Windows palette. It’s colorful and still harmonic.

Philippe Lesire’s Atomic for Windows probably tops them all. He managed to make his game look better than the Amiga original.

Windows games are different (2)

In my previous post, I have explored some of the technical aspects of how Windows games are different from others. Before we turn to the gameplay aspects, let’s be aware of some things.

A specific Windows game culture exists approximately from the beginning till the release of Diablo. It was not Windows 95 that brought the change, but DirectX. DirectX allowed a Windows game to behave just like a DOS game, or any other game on any other platform. Since then, it makes little sense to regard Windows games separately.

But that still means that for practical purposes the era we are exploring mostly overlaps with the Windows 3.x era and typical Windows game not always, but usually means Windows 3.x game. As I am writing this, MobyGames lists less than a thousand Windows 3.x games. As a comparison, the Commodore 64 gamebase has 21,000 entries. Just keep this in mind whenever numbers turn up.

Windows was, in the relevant era, mainly the realm of freeware and shareware authors. There are very few commercial games that are true Windows games. SimCity is an example, and the ICOM Simulations adventures: Shadowgate, Deja Vu, Uninvited. This probably explains the lack of adventures and RPGs. Still it’s astonishing that none of the open-source roguelikes were ported.

But even when looking only at those types of games that have always been popular with shareware and freeware authors, you will find that the popularity in general and the popularity on Windows are inversely related, if they are related at all. You will find few implementations of ever-popular arcade concepts like Breakout or Pac-Man. But on the other hand, a good many classic as well as obscure arcade machines have been remade on Windows at least once. There are at least two or three Centipede clones, and the only remake of Head-On I ever came across is the Windows game Killer Cars. But the arcade game that was most popular with Windows programmers, the only one that could be called a typical Windows game, was, for some reason, Missile Command.

One type of game that has been hugely popular on Windows and very little elsewhere are card games. I’ve written about possible reasons in an earlier post and won’t repeat them here. Suffice to say that I wouldn’t be astonished if about 10–20% of all Windows 3.x games ever written were card games. It’s similar, though less extreme, with casino games. But I haven’t really looked into this yet, I just notice how often I come across them.

A lot of Windows games were based on very simple concepts. Sometimes these were old board or pen-and-paper games like peg solitaire or battleship, but very often they were commercial games like Mastermind (a Windows favorite) or, more remarkable Black Box. The popularity of the latter seems to me so remarkable because I don’t think the board game is all that well known, as is the case with Mastermind. There are very few implementations on other platforms, a few BASIC games, a few C64 games, but a relatively astonishing number of Windows games.

Mazes of all kinds turn up very often too. Top-down mazes, occasionally with bridges. 3D mazes you walk around in, in one case (WinWayout) even populated with some monsters, but in most cases it’s just a maze with no real gameplay.

Sometimes the simplicity of the concept is almost embarrassing—there are actually a few Tic-Tac-Toes with no opponent.

This popularity of simple concepts probably has technical reasons as well. Programming environments for GUI systems give you a lot of tools. To create a window with several buttons and assign them some simple functions is almost no work at all, and a Yahtzee is little more.

The way these programming environments are built, I always found it tempting to create the software equivalent of Franz Gsellmann’s Weltmaschine—a program with lots of buttons and menus and configuration options that really doesn’t do anything at all.