I enjoy the occasional game of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which uses F1 to open the old hlp files. However microsoft discontinued hlp after win 8, so they don't work on win 10. I've looked at a few websites that tell me this can be EASILY fixed.... if I only install their 3rd party software, while 15 popups cover most of their page.

Since H3 isn't the only old game that uses hlp files, I'm wondering if anyone here has already found an easy (safe) way to reenable them for modern windows.

No, which is hilarous since I just opened the man file for Rogue, which has a file date stated as 1986.

Archive.org has a Microsoft HLP help-file viewer for download if you wanna golf that a try.

This is indeed easily fixed by downloading the official WinHelp program from Microsoft. They don't ship it as part of Windows anymore but they still offer it for download on their webpage. Click here.

Thank you. I already saw that and saw that it only applies to win 8, unless I'm mistaken. I have about a dozen copies of winhlp on my win 10 and hlp doesn't work. It's not just that the file isn't included anymore, the format itself won't work with newer systems.

Unless you've done that yourself and are saying it does work?

I did manage to get HLP working on Windows 10 back when I was using it. I should take a look through my files to see where I have the script for it.

Well I only have the winhlp32.exe file. I wasn't sure if that's all you needed. I think it goes into system32 right? I remember having a script for it, not a zip file with the exe inside it...

Unless you want to manually extract the files and then run a whole bunchof commands, you could just do what I did some odd years ago, use WinHelpDecompiler and just read the a little messy .rtf file in Notepad++. Even if it's really old it comes with a GUI and works on 10.

https://oocities.org/mwinterhoff/helpdeco.htm
https://www.oocities.org/dipakauddy/hlpdecogui.htm

Otherwise, you can probably compile it yourself: https://github.com/pmachapman/helpdeco

I'm using that on Windows 10 and it works just fine. See screenshot.

You only need one copy of it on your harddrive but you should also associate .hlp files with it if you want to open them with a doubleclick. If you don't know how to do that:

1) Rightclick on any .hlp file, select 'Open with...'.
2) The requester 'How do you want to open this file?' appears. See screenshot 2. The requester shows the currently with .hlp files associated program. Click 'more apps'.
3) The requester will show a list of installed apps. If the Winhlp app can't be found (which I guess will be the case) scroll the list to the bottom and click 'Look for another app on this PC'.
4) A file requester appears. Use it to go to the directory where you have WinHelp installed and select winhlp32.exe.
5) Check 'Always use this app to open .HLP files' and click OK.

So I went to to the micro store:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=47671

I dld it and as expected, it said it wouldn't work my OS. I tried Geralt's suggestion of "open with", but it would never allow me to select the 277 kb win32hlp.exe, insisting on only using the 12kb win32hlp.exe stub (which opens the edge browser with an MS help page). I tried changing all HLP files extensions, but it would only allow me to select the stub file.

Oddly, I CAN click on the exe itself, and then browse to find the H3 file and open it, but I can't do this from the game. I'll look into Sancript's methods next.

I just checked what the game is doing when you press F1.

Instead of simply executing the .hlp file (which means to let the OS decide with which program to open it) it explicitly starts c:\windows\winhlp32.exe. So no matter what you do, pressing F1 within the game won't work.