osFree Janus Version (winver)

A clone of the classic Windows 3.x "About" utility (winver). This is part of the osFree Win16 Personality project — an open-source implementation of the 16-bit Windows environment.

📖 About

This application displays the standard "About" dialog, extracting information from the system library SHELL.DLL. The dialog's appearance depends on the specific system implementation. It is a component of the osFree Janus project to create an open-source clone of Windows 3.0.

The project continues the original idea by Marcel Baur (1997) and is currently maintained by the osFree team.

✨ Features

• Prioritized loading from SHELL.DLL: The application attempts to load the ShellAbout function from the original library. If successful, it uses the system dialog.
• Standalone mode: If SHELL.DLL is unavailable, the application creates its own dialog with version, operating mode, and debug information.
• Windows mode detection: Correctly identifies and displays the system's operating mode:
  • Real Mode
  • Standard Mode
  • 386 Enhanced Mode
• Localization: Supports English (En.rc) and Russian (Ru.rc) languages. Contributions for additional languages are welcome.
• Debug support: When a debug version of the system is present, a DEBUG prefix is shown.

🧩 Project Structure

File	Description
winver.c	Main application source code
winver.h	Header file with resource identifiers
makefile	Build file for Open Watcom Make
rsrc.rc	Main resource file that includes language modules
En.rc	Resources for English
Ru.rc	Resources for Russian
_wcc.cmd / _wcc.sh	Auxiliary build scripts

🤝 Contributing

We welcome your contributions! Please keep the following in mind:

• Bug reports: Create issues in the Issues section.
• Pull requests: Send your improvements and fixes.
• Documentation and localization: Help translating the interface into other languages is highly valuable.

📜 License

Distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 (LGPL-2.1). See LICENSE for more details.

🔗 Related Projects

• osFree Win16 Personality (WIN16) — the main project to create an open-source clone of Windows 3.x
• osFree Project — the parent project for an open-source OS/2 clone
• Notepad — a clone of Notepad
• Taskman — a clone of Task Manager

👤 Copyright

• Copyright (C) 1997 Marcel Baur
• Copyright (C) 2023 Yuri Prokushev and the osFree team

---

Last updated: May 18, 2026