Progman.exe emulation

[mateli]

Currently retrowin32 lacks a menu system to start multiple applications.

Program Manager is a classic menu system and program launcher for windows applications. It was available from windows 3.1 to Windows XP service pack 1. After it's removal from windows many guides on how ro bring it back has been circulating and there is at least one open source application for modern windows versions.

The idea is that when retrowin32 is started to run progman.exe a rust implementation of the program runs. Although rather than implementing this as a windows application it can be part of the emulator itself

The original program manager is not open source but a clone can be found here:
https://github.com/veselcraft/progman

[mateli]

I realize now that this will have a lot in common with #104 as it depends on multitasking.

It serves two use cases. One is the ability to have a simple desktop environment that can easily be copied between machines. There is an easy of use factor here that is high.

There are many scenario's where this is convenient. For example running in the browser and making it full screen. Or running it directly on a framebuffer.

The second use case is of course to bring back the classic windows experience. Or rather "classic classic" windows experience when "classic" usually refer to the windows 95 design. Creating progman.exe doesn't mean that we can't also have explorer.exe but it's better to start with the simpler application.

So why do this as part of the emulator rather than writing a win32 implementation of progman.exe. Well there is two reasons. The first is that its more difficult to implement it as a pure win32 application. The second one is performance.