Discord client that works on Win95*, Win98 and above

Just a gentle warning: try out alternative Discord clients with a non-important account first. A few years ago, I used ripcord¹ and got automatically banned by Discord - probably because I had started the original Discord client on the same computer, and this triggered some heuristics. Discord&#x27;s first-level support was not willing to reinstate my account, and I had to² track down their head of security on Twitter to get my account reinstated.<p>¹) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cancel.fm&#x2F;ripcord&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cancel.fm&#x2F;ripcord&#x2F;</a>, no new releases since 2021<p>²) I&#x27;d not generally suggest this approach. However, since COVID we have been using Discord a lot for informal communication with our students. Losing access to a dozen course servers mid-semester was a huge problem for me.

It surprises me that they copied the suboptimal tablet-like UI layout of the official client. It&#x27;s gotta be an MDI app with each chat in a separate window :)

I still don&#x27;t get why so many channels that should probably be on IRC moved to Discord. Yesterday I tried to share the output of an strace and apparently I have to pay to emit more than 2000 characters. Login to Discord is something that shocks me: every single time I&#x27;m told that I&#x27;m logging in from a new computer (wrong). Confim I&#x27;m human. Then need to check my email. Confirm. And relogin. This at least to me happens every single time. Reported to Discord obviously in vain. Never experienced such a login disaster in my life.<p>What is wrong with IRC and mailing lists that everyone jumped to Discord? Since I have started to use Discord couldn&#x27;t find a single good thing about it.

&gt; You might be able to use Mingw-w64, but you might run into trouble running the final product on anything newer than XP<p>I rarely see a <i>maximum</i> system requirement.

* from the recent commit &quot;V1.07 works on Win95. But you have to install a different LibCrypto, LibSSL, and also install the WinSock2 update.&quot;<p>Download for the Win95 version: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DiscordMessenger&#x2F;dm&#x2F;releases&#x2F;tag&#x2F;v1.07a">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DiscordMessenger&#x2F;dm&#x2F;releases&#x2F;tag&#x2F;v1.07a</a>

According to the author&#x27;s bluesky posts, there&#x27;s a few features missing from Win32s compared to regular Win32 that prevent this from being ported even further back to windows 3.1 easily.

Minimum system requirements: 64 Mb RAM.<p>Hear that, official Discord?<p>---<p>Now, considering this project will be hunted down and DMCA-ed or C&amp;D-ed soon, has the original author considered separating the generic messenger UI code from the transport code to make the codebase usable for less ... jealous ... services?

Time to stuff this into BoxedWine (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boxedwine.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boxedwine.org&#x2F;</a>) and we&#x27;ll finally have a fast, lightweight chat client for Discord!

Just beautiful. 64Mb of RAM and snappy due to native UI framework use. Compare it to the sluggish 1.2Gb of RAM that Teams uses (when not in a video call).

Someone needs to get around to doing this for Microsoft Teams.

Somewhat unrelated, but it&#x27;s crazy to see how durable Windows APIs are. I, for unrelated reasons, last month, opened Guitar Pro 4, which had been laying around in my warez folder (copied many tines accross hard drives) since I pirated it circa 2004 as a teenager, and it worked perfectly in my machine running windows 11. Even though I love Linux, that doesn&#x27;t happen over there, right?

Open protocols are eternal. Proprietary garbage lasts as long as the company does.

Maybe it&#x27;s just my laptops (MacBook Air and Pro). But every time I open it, it&#x27;s always &quot;updating&quot; (plugins?) before I can use it. Opening it in the browser is much faster.

Looks like the security&#x2F;integrity of SSL isn&#x27;t taken too seriously as the build recommends to use a hex editor to replace &quot;_strtoi64&quot; and &quot;_strtoui64&quot; with &quot;functions likely to return 0 such as iswxdigit&quot; in order to successfully link OpenSSL on windows 2000 and earlier. Unclear what impact such a hack would have on the integrity of the crypto operations performed by OpenSSL?

Cool, but Bitlbee can proxy any IRC client (even for DOS and Windows) against some server and use your accounts (even Mastodon) over IRC.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitlbee.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitlbee.org</a>

I used to love cordless. I could be on an old Sparc machine or even DOS on a 486 and access Discord.<p>Unfortunately the only thing alternative clients for are good for now is getting banned.

If you use [1] you can run it on Windows 3.1.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42959775">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42959775</a>

That&#x27;s a fun project. But I wonder: is it a good idea to connect to the internet from these old systems?

So many good memories when seeing such design... I wonder why things got so complicated nowadays

How long until they get slapped with a trademark claim?

It looks so snappy and efficient

Cool project, but it is missing central features of Discord such as voice and screen sharing.