Even though Windows 3.1 is over 30 years old now, there’s still occasionally new apps and games, thanks to the retro computing community. This time, a ChatGPT client has been released for Windows 3.1, called WinGPT.
DialupDotNet, the same developer behind the Wordle clone for Windows 3.1 from last year, has released WinGPT. As the name implies, it’s a client for ChatGPT that works within Windows 3.1 — you can type messages just as you would with ChatGPT in a web browser, and the answers appear in the text area. However, it does function a bit differently, as the responses are intended to be brief so the API calls don’t take up too much memory.
The developer explained, “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.” The project’s site explains some of the development process, which involved creating elements like the status bar from scratch, because many UI elements in Windows weren’t available for third-party programs to use until Windows 95.
WinGPT is compatible with Windows 3.1 or later, and is available in 16-bit and 32-bit versions — the latter of which works on more modern versions of Windows, including Windows 11. You’ll need to supply your own OpenAI API key, though.
Source: DialupDotNet
