This was most certainly not the case when using CD burners in windows 9x. I remember my friend being afraid of even moving the mouse while burning a CD.
Did you try using the MAD MP3 decoder, which only relied on fixed point? I remember trying it several times and comparing the audio output to the other decoders and wondering what the deal was. I had a Pentium though and didn't know enough about floating point to understand the issue.
I think OpenWatcom supports windows 3.x and it's quite a nice compiler if you are targeting older PC systems and don't require support for the latest versions of C or C++. You can easily use it to cross-compile from a modern OS and I used it a few years ago for a Hackathon where we implemented a simple demo that we built on Linux and ran in DOSBox with a CI-like pipeline (no Jenkins involved since it was just for fun).
Thanks, now when I checked it again I see a reference to TempleOS so that is for sure it. I wonder why they put this in the repo of 9front though.
It's the main repo according to the release page.
https://9front.org/releases/2023/11/22/0/
Edit: There are files with quotes from a bunch of other famous people from the OS community there too. Ken Thompson, Theo de Raadt etc.