Someone made a ChatGPT app for Windows 3.1 PCs. WinGPT brings a very basic version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT answers into an app that can run on an old 386 chip. It was built by the same mysterious developer behind it bandagea word clone for Microsoft’s Windows 3.1 operating system.
“I didn’t want my 1993 Gateway 4DX2-66 to be left out of the AI revolution, so I built an AI assistant for Windows 3.1 based on the OpenAI API,” the developer said in a statement. Hacker news wire.
WinGPT is written in C using Microsoft’s standard Windows API and connects to OpenAI’s API server using TLS 1.3, so no separate modern PC is needed. That was a particularly interesting part of making this app work on Windows 3.1, in addition to managing the memory segmentation architecture on 16-bit versions of Windows and building the user interface for the app.
Neowin notes that the ChatGPT responses are only short due to the limited memory support that cannot handle the context of conversations. The icon for WinGPT is also designed in Borland’s Image Editor, a clone of Microsoft Paint that can create ICO files.
“I built most of the UI directly in C, which meant that every UI component had to be built manually in code,” says the anonymous WinGPT developer. “I was surprised that the set of default controls that can be used by any program running Windows 3.1 is incredibly limited. You have a number of controls you’d expect – pushbuttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, edit boxes – but all the other controls you could need , including those used in the operating system itself, are not available.
If you still have a Windows 3.1 machine gathering dust in an attic, garage or basement, you can download the WinGPT binaries for 16-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows at dial.net – the most suitable domain name I’ve ever seen for old Windows apps.
