Any way to make games on Windows 3.0?

[m1x3rr]

Any way to make games on Windows 3.0? I'm trying to make a Windows game on a DS just for the hell of it.

 

[FAST6191]

What does Windows game on a DS have to do with Windows 3.0? Or do you mean you are writing a game on the DS (presumably one of the text editors available for it and compiling elsewhere) and decided to target Windows 3.0 (why that and not 3.11 by the way?) for some reason?

We will skip the technically a game discussion here; many found the game in the URL of browsers the other year funny ( https://www.wired.com/2011/03/url-hunter-a-cool-game-but-not-html5/ ), you could always do a choose your own adventure in basic pre 5 HTML that has the decisions be literal links to different pages (can even be quite a good game as you are not bound to have to write game logic or physics engine to handle it as it is all text and possibly some images), browser games themselves can be tricky, though I will note what would then have been Macromedia Flash and Shockwave would just have got in under the line and have at least old versions work on Windows 3.0.

Either way you will want a compiler that works for Windows 3.0 (or more likely DOS -- it would be Windows 95 or maybe some version of NT before Windows itself really mattered for most gaming purposes, and even then reboot into DOS was a thing for a long time), or some runtime for an interpreted language that works as well.
I am not sure what goes for the big selection of commonly used interpreted languages these days, and there are always those that attempt to twist old MS operating systems into something more vaguely usable by modern hardware which cuts the other way and means modern software also gets twisted to work on them that I might not be aware of. That said if you are going to rock up at the usual python, lua, java, perl, scheme, lisp, ruby main website and expect to get something working from there you might in for a disappointment.
Likewise some modern compilers of C and assembly (for most this means the GNU GCC dev kit, though I am not sure what goes for Windows 3.whatever or getting MinGW and Cygwin to work there, and Microsoft Visual Studio in the current world) might technically be able to support something but you are more likely to find yourself going back to something that officially worked with it either at the time or in the time afterwards when it was still supported (Delphi, Borland, intel's efforts and a bunch I have probably long since forgotten) which also brings up the annoyance of having to use said old software as it was not like the nice modern compilers. Hopefully a modern compiler will play nicely. Like any version of Windows you will want to look up the API for it, which is going to be fairly minimal compared to modern stuff (see MSCDEX for but one example, and inserting a USB drive might be a fairly impressive trick that involves installing drivers, good luck with 3d acceleration as well, and also good luck with any of the nice libraries like SDL that people frequently lean into for such things, dos4gw might be another choice term to search for). You might also find it beneficial to get down and dirty with assembly (TSR would still be a valid trick with useful things it can achieve) which brings in having to learn assembly ( https://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/ and https://stuff.pypt.lt/ggt80x86a/asm1.htm , with the former maybe even still having some stuff to work with 16 bit sub systems as well as more modern stuff).

If you are asking this sort of question you are going to be facing an uphill struggle as well. Might be easier to target a nice newer version of Windows and then figure out how to backport it to work on older things like 3.0 (whatever drivers are needed, possibly what style of C might be needed if only an older compiler will work, what you have to do to get memory usage down).

 

[m1x3rr]

Ah, okay.