A game jam for creating games that target the Win32 API. The point is to have new jam content for retro PCs. See what it takes to make your game run on Windows 98 SE, Windows XP or Wine. Play with DirectX 9 or even earlier DirectX versions. Use OpenGL 1.1 or OpenGL 2.0 for rendering. Play with OpenAL, the waveOut API or DirectSound. Write your own WndProc or use SDL 1.2. Use MinGW-W64 (which, despite the name, can still target Win32 on 32-bit x86) or Visual C++.

Of course, Win16 apps (runnable on Windows 3.x and 32-bit Windows releases after that) are welcome as well.

We hang out in #dos-game-jam (yes, DOS) in the DOS Shareware Zone Discord.

Starting Points

Not necessary, but might be useful if you don't have an idea which tools to use:

C/C++ toolchains:

• MinGW-W64 (GCC compiler): https://www.mingw-w64.org/downloads/
• Visual Studio 6: https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-visual-stu/60
• Open Watcom 2.0: https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2

Graphics APIs:

• Direct3D
• DirectDraw
• GDI
• OpenGL

Audio APIs:

• DirectSound
• OpenAL
• waveOut

OS level abstractions:

• SDL 1.2

Emulators/compatibility layers for Win32 apps (to try out your apps on different systems/environments if you don't have original hardware):

• Wine (Linux, BSDs, macOS)
• DOSBox-X  + native Win9x
• retrowin32 (Win32 emulator for the web)
• PCem / 86box
• QEMU / VirtualBox / ... + native Win9x/XP