Do you use Windows 3.1? Do your friends send you jokes and haikus written by ChatGPT, and make you
feel left out? Do you wish you had the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips? Or wish you
had your very own AI chatbot on your trusty 386?
Wish no more! Introducing WinGPT, an AI Assistant for Windows 3.1.
WinGPT helps you:[1]
-
Do research: WinGPT helpfully answers your queries on everything from current events to
kitchen recipes. Say goodbye to dusty encyclopedias and Encarta! -
Stay entertained: WinGPT gives helpful life advice and tells you jokes to your
heart’s content. Embrace a world of multimedia entertainment right on your desktop,
as long as it’s text-based! -
Master your productivity: WinGPT is your digital sidekick, helping you draft documents and
spreadsheets with the utmost confidence.
How was this made?
WinGPT is written in C, using the standard Windows API. I used
Open Watcom v2 as the
compiler, which is very convenient as it supports cross-compiling to 16-bit Windows from even Windows 11.
WinGPT connects to the OpenAI API server natively with TLS 1.3, so it doesn’t require a proxy on a
modern machine to terminate TLS. To see how I did this and some of the challenges,
take a look at Modern TLS on 16-bit Windows. (As you’ll see on that page,
this is not a secure implementation).
Building the UI
Having been used to building Windows apps like Windle using
Delphi previously,
I was surprised how primitive the UI building capabilities are with Windows 3.1 if you only use the
built-in Windows API.
I built most of the UI in C directly, meaning that each UI component had to be manually constructed in code.
Resizing logic manually ensures that each component retains its proper size when the window is resized.
In particular, I was surprised that the set of standard controls available to use by any program with
Windows 3.1 is incredibly limited. You have some controls you’d expect—push buttons, check boxes, radio
buttons, edit boxes—but any other control you might need, including those used across the operating
system itself, aren’t available.
I ran into this problem when I was trying to figure out how to add a status bar to WinGPT. Status bars
appear all over Windows 3.1, including in the File Manager and Control Panel. Unfortunately, Microsoft
didn’t make them widely available to other application developers until Windows 95, alongside a
bunch of other useful controls like progress bars, toolbars, and tree views.[2]
As an aside, I asked ChatGPT how I might be able to use a status bar in my program. It replied with a header file
that only exists for later versions of Windows, and when I asked it to clarify, it came up with the name
of a very enticing (but I’m pretty sure very non-existent) UI library. Luckily, Philip J. Erdelsky still
has a status bar implementation
from 1997 that is very kindly in the public domain that I was able to use! I modified that code to more closely
represent the status bars in Microsoft’s programs pixel for pixel.
Another fun part of building WinGPT was designing the icon in Borland’s Image Editor, which is really
just a clone of Microsoft Paint that happens to make ICO files instead. Program icons in Windows 3.1 are
32×32, and show up in the Program Manager as well as in the task switcher. I also designed a 16×16
version that shows up on later versions of Windows.
Limitations
Memory is quite limited on Windows 3.1 machines, so I tried to reduce the
amount of memory needed for WinGPT, especially in sending and receiving the query and response from
the OpenAI API. The JSON responses of modern APIs aren’t especially optimized for size, and OpenAI’s
API is no exception. I’ve asked the model to be brief in an effort to keep responses as small as possible.
I’ve also chosen not to send the text of previous turns in the API calls, even though this means that the
bot won’t be able to use prior conversation context.
Try WinGPT
WinGPT is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2.
WinGPT will work on any 16-bit or 32-bit version of Windows post-Windows 3.1. It requires an
implementation of Winsock (tested with Microsoft TCP/IP-32 3.11b on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and
on stock Windows 2000). It will not work on 64-bit versions of Windows (but does work on
Wine—give it a try!)
You’ll also need an OpenAI API key to talk to OpenAI. Once you open WinGPT, go to File | Options… to
enter your secret key.
- Download: Binaries for 16-bit and 32-bit Windows
- Source: Bundled with the modified WolfSSL source code (in
watcom16/wingpt)