5 ms·

Didn't Microsoft drop 16 bit application support in Windows 10? I remember being saddened by my exe of Jezzball I've carried from machine to machine no longer w

Didn't Microsoft drop 16 bit application support in Windows 10? I remember being saddened by my exe of Jezzball I've carried from machine to machine no longer working.

mkup 10mo ago
Microsoft has dropped 16-bit application support via builtin emulator (NTVDM) from 64-bit builds of Windows, whether it happens to be Windows 10 or earlier version of Windows, depends on user (in my case, it was Windows Vista). However, you can still run 16-bit apps on 64-bit builds of Windows via third party emulators, such as DOSBox and NTVDMx64.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- lmm 10mo ago
  > you can still run 16-bit apps on 64-bit builds of Windows via third party emulators, such as DOSBox and NTVDMx64. Or Wine, which is less reliable but funnier.
  - ale42 10mo ago
    Do you mean winevdm? https://github.com/otya128/winevdm https://github.com/otya128/winevdm Wine itself doesn't run on Windows AFAIK.
    - lmm 10mo ago
      > Wine itself doesn't run on Windows AFAIK. It does, if you use an old enough version of windows that SUA is available :). I never managed to get fontconfig working so text overlapped its dialogue boxes and the like, but it was good enough to run what I needed.
    - davidgerard 10mo ago
      Wine ran sort-of-fineish in WSL v1 and I'm pretty sure it'll run perfectly in WSL v2 (which is just a VM).
      - ale42 10mo ago
        True, but at this point you're basically doing Windows-on-Linux-on-Windows. But why not anyway... applications will anyway run way faster than on the hardware they were originally thought for.
        davidgerard 10mo ago
        The real prize is running Win16 apps on 64-bit Windows. Mind you, Wine might lose that too ...
notepad0x90 10mo ago
and Linux stopped supporting 32bit x86 I think around the same time? (just i386?)
- Dylan16807 10mo ago
  Are you talking about CPU support? I installed a 32 bit program on basic linux mint just the other day. If I really need to load up a pentium 4 I can deal with it being an older kernel.
  - notepad0x90 10mo ago
    That's exactly what I mean, I wish Linux was more like NetBSD in its architecture support. It kind of sucks that it is open source but it acts like a corporate entity that calculates profitability of things. There is one very important reason to support things in open source: Because you committed to it, and you can. If there are practical reasons such as lack of willing maintainers (I refuse to believe out of all the devs that beg to have a serious role in kernel maintenance, none are willing to support i386 - if NetBSD has people, so too Linux), totally understandable. You'd expect Microsoft to support things because it doesn't make money for them anymore or some other calculated cost reason, but Microsoft is supporting old things few people use even when it costs them performance/secure edges.
    - Dylan16807 10mo ago
      Well for now the kernel still supports it. And the main barrier going forward is some memory mapping stuff that anyone could fix. Though personally, while I care a lot about using old software on new hardware, my desire to use new software on old hardware only goes so far back and 32 bit mainstream CPUs are out of that range.
      - notepad0x90 10mo ago
        I think eventually 32 bit hardware and software shouldn't be supported. But there are still plenty of both. We shouldn't get rid of good hardware because it's too old, that's wasteful. 16bit had serious limits but 32 bit is still valid for many applications and environments that don't need >3GB~ ram. For example, routers shouldn't use 64bit processors unless they're handling that much load, die size matter there, that's why they use Arm mostly, and that's why Arm has thumb mode (less instruction width = smaller die size). I'm sure the tiny amounts of money and energy saved by not having that much register/instruction width adds up when talking about billions of devices. Open source isn't where I'd expect abandonware to happen.

Didn't Microsoft drop 16 bit application support in Windows 10? I remember being saddened by my exe of Jezzball I've carried from machine to machine no longer working.

mkup 10mo ago

Microsoft has dropped 16-bit application support via builtin emulator (NTVDM) from 64-bit builds of Windows, whether it happens to be Windows 10 or earlier version of Windows, depends on user (in my case, it was Windows Vista). However, you can still run 16-bit apps on 64-bit builds of Windows via third party emulators, such as DOSBox and NTVDMx64.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
lmm 10mo ago
> you can still run 16-bit apps on 64-bit builds of Windows via third party emulators, such as DOSBox and NTVDMx64. Or Wine, which is less reliable but funnier.
- ale42 10mo ago
  Do you mean winevdm? https://github.com/otya128/winevdm https://github.com/otya128/winevdm Wine itself doesn't run on Windows AFAIK.
  - lmm 10mo ago
    > Wine itself doesn't run on Windows AFAIK. It does, if you use an old enough version of windows that SUA is available :). I never managed to get fontconfig working so text overlapped its dialogue boxes and the like, but it was good enough to run what I needed.
  - davidgerard 10mo ago
    Wine ran sort-of-fineish in WSL v1 and I'm pretty sure it'll run perfectly in WSL v2 (which is just a VM).
    - ale42 10mo ago
      True, but at this point you're basically doing Windows-on-Linux-on-Windows. But why not anyway... applications will anyway run way faster than on the hardware they were originally thought for.
      - davidgerard 10mo ago
        The real prize is running Win16 apps on 64-bit Windows. Mind you, Wine might lose that too ...

notepad0x90 10mo ago

and Linux stopped supporting 32bit x86 I think around the same time? (just i386?)

Dylan16807 10mo ago
Are you talking about CPU support? I installed a 32 bit program on basic linux mint just the other day. If I really need to load up a pentium 4 I can deal with it being an older kernel.
- notepad0x90 10mo ago
  That's exactly what I mean, I wish Linux was more like NetBSD in its architecture support. It kind of sucks that it is open source but it acts like a corporate entity that calculates profitability of things. There is one very important reason to support things in open source: Because you committed to it, and you can. If there are practical reasons such as lack of willing maintainers (I refuse to believe out of all the devs that beg to have a serious role in kernel maintenance, none are willing to support i386 - if NetBSD has people, so too Linux), totally understandable. You'd expect Microsoft to support things because it doesn't make money for them anymore or some other calculated cost reason, but Microsoft is supporting old things few people use even when it costs them performance/secure edges.
  - Dylan16807 10mo ago
    Well for now the kernel still supports it. And the main barrier going forward is some memory mapping stuff that anyone could fix. Though personally, while I care a lot about using old software on new hardware, my desire to use new software on old hardware only goes so far back and 32 bit mainstream CPUs are out of that range.
    - notepad0x90 10mo ago
      I think eventually 32 bit hardware and software shouldn't be supported. But there are still plenty of both. We shouldn't get rid of good hardware because it's too old, that's wasteful. 16bit had serious limits but 32 bit is still valid for many applications and environments that don't need >3GB~ ram. For example, routers shouldn't use 64bit processors unless they're handling that much load, die size matter there, that's why they use Arm mostly, and that's why Arm has thumb mode (less instruction width = smaller die size). I'm sure the tiny amounts of money and energy saved by not having that much register/instruction width adds up when talking about billions of devices. Open source isn't where I'd expect abandonware to happen.