Right here we have a simple tutorial, it may sound silly, but it is very useful for many people come on this topic is authentic and exclusive to Liwis James who decided to help the community with the results obtained from the questions about vbdos vb3 and vb6.

Well first I'll introduce you to vbdos, even though you know:

vbdos is a single version of visual basic windows 1.0 developed by microsoft for MSDOS has been discontinued for one reason: money.

but continued for windows 3.11 up to vb4 (last version for windows 3- 16 bits)

See the vbdos(visual basic for msdos):

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See windows 3.11:

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now that you know both and know that the latest version is visual basic 4, you can study on and understand better but the tutorial will make it clear.


If we look at windows 3.11 it is still an executable that does not need to boot initially it starts in MSDOS, this only ends up in windows chicago(95beta) and in the next Win9x


Knowing all, let's go step by step, you can delete all the things from windows 3.11 that are useless and modify all the ini files as errors appear:

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seeing the programs above and assuming you know how to modify the files we'll leave from here now.


everything magical that occurs in windows 3.11 has three simple names:

krn386.exe
win.com
programan.exe

these simple programs are the life of windows 3.11 basically, but our whole tutorial will be about just 2 of them WIN.COM and PROGMAN.EXE.


Now we get to the tutorial step by step, we will need a text editor and delete or move PROGMAN.EXE to another folder.


Well now if we start our windows by msdos or freedos on a virtual machine we will see that without PROGMAN.EXE (PROGRAM MANAGER) only the gray background of windows 3.11 is shown.


This is for one reason alone, windows 3.11 is actually an interface layer that creates windows it's just that, which is basically similar to vbdos that creates a GDI with ASCII code and colors creates your form see how they are.

vbdos (See Ground):

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Windows 3.11 (See Ground):

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now that we've seen how windows works and unraveled the mystery I think you understand what's next.


with PROGMAN.EXE removed and only the gray background, the image above doesn't show a gray background as they are taken from the internet, I didn't do it again because I had already done it and it's a lot of work:


Well now we have 3 interesting options:

1) Create an immediate load of your program.
2) Rename your program.
3) Hex Modification.


In this line of tutorial I'm not going to teach everything I'm going to teach superficially if it wouldn't be too long.


summarizing the options:

modify the hexadecimal of the WIN.COM file that would make you look for PROGMAN.EXE inside it by doing that you can change it to the name of your app.

Renaming your application and putting it in the same folder as WIN.COM but your PROGMAN .EXE (vb3 or vb4 or any) will always be named PROGMAN.EXE and this is bad for the dynamics of creating multiple apps.

Last and simplest option we will follow is to put the file path when windows load and this will happen.



Following the last option above, let's open WIN.INI

and let's go to the lines:

Onload "Notepad.exe", "regedit.exe"

on the line when windows load we will put the directory of your executable application from vb3 or vb4. or even another executable in any language.



You're done your application will run directly on windows 3.11 so you can see your program as in vbdos.


And the last and most viable alternative is also to create a command in the Autoexec.bat of Msdos or Freedos and then do the following thing, create the command by autoexec then 'anywhere you typed the command as a native variable it will run your program directly on the screen gray, just delete PROGMAN.EXE

then in C:\anylocal> you can type the command and name of the .exe

well that was the tutorial and to do everything you need an iso editor and a virtual machine.