That's pretty much what they did, but as a fundamental architecture of the OS. The "emulation box" is the win32 subsystem. Applications interact with the API in

That's pretty much what they did, but as a fundamental architecture of the OS. The "emulation box" is the win32 subsystem. Applications interact with the API in the subsystem, which translates, for example, win32 calls to the native NT API. They also created a POSIX subsystem and an OS/2 subsystem.