GoKawiil
Tech News
A programmer released Stars!VM, a self-contained tool that emulates an 80286 processor and bridges Win16 calls to Win32, letting the 1995 4X strategy game Stars! run natively on modern 64-bit Windows without DOSBox, Wine, or retro hardware. The signed GitHub release embeds a compressed copy of the original 16-bit executable, so the single file runs out of the box with added 4K scaling and a modern file picker.
Developer Mayuki used Claude to vibe-code ReProgman, a lightweight clone of the classic Windows 3.1 Program Manager shell that ran until Windows 95 replaced it in the mid-1990s. The 12-16MB tool requires no installation, runs on both Windows 11 and Apple Silicon Macs via .NET SDK 10.0+, and has been published on GitHub under the MIT license.
Microsoft released Windows 95 on August 24, 1995, an event that drew crowds lining up for the software in a way never repeated for a Microsoft product. The operating system marked a major upgrade over Windows 3.x, introducing true multitasking instead of relying on applications to cooperatively share resources. It also better exploited faster processors, unlike Windows 3.1, which plateaued in performance around 100 MHz regardless of chip.