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I don't think it would have been so hard for them to develop an emulation layer to run 16-bit programs on 64-bit if they were really concerned about having that

by shawnz 9y ago

I don't think it would have been so hard for them to develop an emulation layer to run 16-bit programs on 64-bit if they were really concerned about having that functionality. It's not like performance issues are going to be a concern in a 16-bit application. So that might be a reason people still use 32-bit Windows, but it surely isn't the reason that Microsoft keeps building for 32-bit.

MaulingMonkey 9y ago
Throwing DOSBox at the problem is easy. Supporting the horrible legacy abominations combining 16-bit windows 3.1 targeting programs running side-by-side and interacting with 32-bit programs is a whole new can of worms. Maintaining an existing works-just-fine 32-bit build is way easier than writing, testing, QAing, and fielding support requests when the emulator layer breaks some poor bastard's existing workflow.