I then saved this .exe to a disk image, and then saved that disk image back to my modern mac that I'm doing this on via downloading that in the browser.
I then took that .exe and the only dependency - vbrun100.dll - and put it on a floppy (a real one) and then took that floppy over to a vintage computer I have that has Windows 3.1 on it still (an old 25 MHz Intel486 DX industrial computer I have sitting in a closet with no real use for). Popped in the floppy, copied the .exe and .dll.
And ran the program, no problem! A real GUI windows program, made in VB running in Windows 3.1, inside an entire emulated machine in Javascript in a browser window running on an Apple Silicon macbook in 2026....
Exported and saved to disk and then ran without issue on a piece of hardware made in *1992*!
Now I need to do the reverse... make some software with a copy of VB installed on this old machine of mine and run it on my mac inside the browser.
Which means I just built a demo of a tiny 16 bit windows GUI applet, using emulated VB in Win 3.1 in a browser and got it to run on modern Windows in a shorter amount of time than it would have likely taken me to get the same type of demo up and running natively in Windows 10 today.
PS: Nine Princes in Amber was an interesting choice alongside the others!
Cool, they have Exploring the IBM PC. It was a bootable disk with a tutorial to teach you how to use the computer (like what the scroll lock button was meant to do, and all the other keys on the original keyboard). I loaded up the CGA version on the CGA IBM PC emulator, which also plays music. The sound was cutting out though. In a later part (the Fun Writer) when you can turn on the "radio", the music seems to be missing the rests. I guess it's not perfect. The program always struck me as doing strange things with the hardware, so that might be why. (I'll have to look into some local emulators to try out. I really only need DOS for what I'm doing. I also have a MisterFPGA...)
Tiny Emulators
https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884395)
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Also this looks pretty neat as well
Interestingly, https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_8-bit_IDE_Adapter_rev... or better yet https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_CompactFlash_Adap... looks like it would work if needed, and then using a CF to IDE adapter like you mentioned.
If you want to modernize the storage for that old PC, then Lo-tech is probably a good choice. They've got a wonderful all-in-one card that includes a mounting bracket, fits into an 8-bit ISA slot, and accepts a CF card directly: https://texelec.com/product/lo-tech-xt-cf-lite-rev-2/
File transfer can be done a number of different ways, including serial ports (USB to RS-232 adapters generally work fine), floppies (USB 3.5" floppy drives are awesome and cheap), and: Networking.
Around the turn of the century, I briefly had an already-old XT machine that had no hard drive, but it did have 10BASE2 Ethernet and Hercules-compatible graphics built into the motherboard.
It was a fun little adventure to get it online with my then-modern LAN and I did a number of unlikely things with it (including a graphical web browser), but the most practical thing it did was connect to a Samba share on my Linux box. It worked great. Old 8-bit network cards are not particularly expensive.
It all depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. :)
Some CF cards don't work well with XT-IDE cards, since they often depend on some specific 8-bit modes that are not guaranteed to work, but SD adapters generally support it. SD cards these days are also more available and probably cheaper, considering you won't even need 2Gb for many retro machines.
Another option is an "ISA USB" card using a CH375 or CH376 chip. This requires software support (a DOS driver or an add-on BIOS ROM) but you can plug in a cheap flash drive and format/partition it like a hard disc.
Yeah I'm wondering about that too. I'd say there's something special about using the real thing: have the old hardware working.
Ideally in a 100% real time-capsule mode: say a Commodore Amiga back then didn't have a "Vampire 8000 GTX Turbo 16-valves" accelerator. My machines are all pristine time capsules, not polluted by modernity.
But as you wrote: at some point something fails. And what do you do then?
I understand the appeal of "fake IDE disks" and "fake floppy drives" etc. but if it's to use stuff emulating part of the real thing, why not just use an emulator emulating the entire real thing?
It's not a criticism: for example I've got a real vintage arcade cab and more often than not the "PCB" that's plugged in is not a vintage PCB (even though I've got several of those) but a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter. And once a game is launched, you can't tell the difference: it's basically cycle-perfect emulation.
Something something about the ship of theseus and all that.
There’s a reason most of us as kids started out with descriptive save names like `INNKEEP.SAV` and `BUYSLED.SAV`, and then halfway through the playthrough it's just `1.SAV`, `2.SAV`, `3.SAV`, etc. :)