>
> > Start with emacs.exe alone, and then add *.elc files according to
> > error messages you get.  You will need lisp/term/w32-win.el at least,
> > but other than that, I don't know.
>
> I see you'd also need simple.elc (because we look for it at startup),
> and with Emacs before 27 also mule-util.elc.  Emacs will probably
> complain about a missing libexec directory, so create it.
>

Thanks!

Got it to work.

Here seems to be the bare minimum structure needed for Emacs 26.3 on
Windows 10:

./bin
./bin/emacs.exe
./libexec
./libexec/emacs
./libexec/emacs/26.3
./libexec/emacs/26.3/x86_64-w64-mingw32
./share
./share/emacs
./share/emacs/26.3
./share/emacs/26.3/etc
./share/emacs/26.3/etc/charsets
./share/emacs/26.3/etc/charsets/8859-10.map
... a lot of map files goes here ..
./share/emacs/26.3/lisp
./share/emacs/26.3/lisp/simple.el
./share/emacs/26.3/lisp/term
./share/emacs/26.3/lisp/term/w32-win.el

I could then successfully do this (from cmd.exe, a similar command also
worked from Git Bash)

  C:\...> bin\emacs.exe --batch -Q --eval "(princ """This is cool!""")"
  This is cool!
  C:\...>

I might write up something more detailed on EmacsWiki later. It took a bit
of trial and error to get it to work and the error messages are only partly
helpful (they mention looking in c:\emacs, a folder that does not exist,
and which is not needed).

One thing that I noticed is the HUGE difference in size of the exe file
between Emacs 24 and later versions. I listed the sizes of the folder when
I keep my different Emacs versions:

8.8M    ./emacs-24.5-official/bin/emacs.exe
91M     ./emacs-25.1-2-x86_64-w64-mingw32_2016_11_16/bin/emacs.exe
119M    ./emacs-26.1-x86_64/bin/emacs.exe
120M    ./emacs-26.2-x86_64/bin/emacs.exe
130M    ./emacs-26.3-x86_64/bin/emacs.exe
16M     ./emacs-bin-w64-24.4/emacs/bin/emacs.exe
121M    ./emax64-bin-20180529/emax64/bin/emacs.exe
119M    ./old/emacs-26.1/bin/emacs.exe

Now, I can probably use an old version for the mentioned scenarios (using
Emacs as a kind of scripting engine), but I am curious about the jump in
sizes. I assume that later versions include something that was earlier
"outside", in separate files, is that right? If I wanted to, could I reduce
the size by building Emacs myself? Is this in some way related to "dumping
Emacs"?

/Mathias