The Road Ahead Left Behind

[ownedbycats]

The disc image is available on the Internet Archive's Software Collection, so I investigated.

setup.exe is a 16-bit file. Winevdm might have some success, I got it to open the installer at least but did no further testing. If not, a virtual machine running Windows 9x almost always works.

I have a fair amount of experience in getting older games to run on modern systems.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

The disc image is available on the Internet Archive's Software Collection, so I investigated.

setup.exe is a 16-bit file. Winevdm might have some success, I got it to open the installer at least but did no further testing. If not, a virtual machine running Windows 9x almost always works.

I have a fair amount of experience in getting older games to run on modern systems.

I thought 16-bit was the problem.

[haertig]

It sounds like this Mircrosoft "book" was not actually a book or an ebook format (like EPUB, MOBI, etc.)

It was a 16-bit program that displayed text/pictures/videos. And you are now having trouble running this 16-bit program.

This is not surprising. But it is not an indictment of the long term viability of actual formats like EPUB, PDF, MOBI, etc.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by haertig

It sounds like this Mircrosoft "book" was not actually a book or an ebook format (like EPUB, MOBI, etc.)

It was a 16-bit program that displayed text/pictures/videos. And you are now having trouble running this 16-bit program.

This is not surprising. But it is not an indictment of the long term viability of actual formats like EPUB, PDF, MOBI, etc.

This is exactly why I cringe when people who poo-poo multimedia and/or interactivity in ebooks suggest that it would be better to do such things in "an app" instead of an ebook. Let the future decide if the world needed multimedia ebooks or not. If such capabilities are baked right into EPUB, at least many of them will have been created with open standards, rather then being fragmented into a million proprietary binary programs.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

This is exactly why I cringe when people who poo-poo multimedia and/or interactivity in ebooks suggest that it would be better to do such things in "an app" instead of an ebook. Let the future decide if the world needed multimedia ebooks or not. If such capabilities are baked right into EPUB, at least many of them will have been created with open standards, rather then being fragmented into a million proprietary binary programs.

I agree it's the best argument for epub3 multimedia, because unfortunately iOS (more deliberately) and Android orphan apps faster than Windows or Linux.