'Open source Windows' ReactOS shows off one of the most iconic Windows games in full screen

If you are looking for a Windows alternative, there have been quite a few that have popped up over the years. In our Look Back column, we revisited some of these like Corel Linux, BeOS, and Lindows. Another such project is ReactOS, and it still gets updates and improvements from time to time.

In March, for example, earlier this year, the team released a couple of quick updates which included improvements related to the Plug and Play Manager, Microsoft's FAT file system, shell and audio upgrades, and more. You can read about them in full in this dedicated article.

This week, ReactOS shared some new details about the progress it has been making. There is a significant upgrade in store this time for Explorer, as it now appropriately handles full-screen apps. To demonstrate this, the team shared a couple of images indicating the post-update before and after changes. It used Microsoft's iconic Hover!, a first-person sci-fi action game which the company used to bundle with Windows 95 CD-ROMs, and interestingly, it was not out there in the open, but was instead hidden inside a "Fun Stuff" folder.

As a trivia, Microsoft also modified Hover! a few times to make it run on Windows 8.1 and on browsers.

Aside from full-screen support, ReactOS imports an oleaut32.dll bug-fix over from Wine that fixes Oracle Virtual Box-related issues for combobox dialogs. As you will see in the example images, users will now be able to create and save settings.

The OLEAUT DLL fix has also helped with a similar 3DMark 2001 bug with settings now clearly visible:

For those wondering, Microsoft's COM or Component Object Model enables interactions among various Windows components including the host apps. Building on this, OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) supports dynamic linking and embedding in Visual Basic 6 (legacy) apps with the help of the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library.

According to Microsoft’s official documentation on the OLEAUT32.dll (dynamic link library) file, it serves as the runtime library that implements OLE Automation for VB6 apps to interact with COM objects dynamically using late binding.

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