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On windows 10, I was unable to install "Flight Simulator 2004" that I bought in 2007. Have you tried to install Word 6 (mid 90s) or visual studio 1.52 on window

On windows 10, I was unable to install "Flight Simulator 2004" that I bought in 2007. Have you tried to install Word 6 (mid 90s) or visual studio 1.52 on windows 10 ?

Crinus 8y ago
16bit Windows software will not work natively on 64bit Windows. However this isn't a recent change, this is happening since the introduction of 64bit Windows and consumers started getting 64bit Windows already for more than a decade ago. There are solutions, however. For 16bit Windows software you can try https://github.com/otya128/winevdm https://github.com/otya128/winevdm which provides 16bit emulation and pass-through of Windows API calls to a mix of Wine and Win32 native calls. It isn't perfect but it can run a lot of Windows 3.x software. You can either drag-drop the executable on the emulator's exe file or use the supplied registry files to install it system-wide. DOS software tends to work fine under DOSBox or vDos (a DOSBox fork explicitly made for text-based DOS applications). Now i'm not saying you cannot find cases where stuff do not work, but in my experience most stuff work out of the box or with little tweaks.
- shawnz 8y ago
  Interesting project, thanks for the link
keypusher 8y ago
There's plenty of good reasons to bash Microsoft, but 'lack of backwards compatibility' just isn't one of them. If anything, I think their obsession with backwards compatibility drove a lot of compromised design decisions at that company.
- reacweb 8y ago
  History of Microsoft is very long. Backwards compatibility was excellent until windows XP (included). This focus on compatibility has largely disappeared in more recent versions. I am not bashing Microsoft. I love visual studio code. I love the fact that I can edit office documents (powerpoint and word) for free using chrome on ubuntu. Maybe the work Microsoft is doing on Windows Subsystem for Linux will make me come back to windows one day.
  - Crinus 8y ago
    Why do you think backwards compatibility dropped? Just recently they decided to not build newer versions of .NET Framework on top of .NET Core (even though they have open sourced practically everything on .NET) to ensure that older programs built on .NET Framework will keep working and wont face issues from any incompatibility with .NET Core. IMO they are making their life a lot harder by introducing all those frameworks and platforms every five years or so, but despite that they still make sure that stuff keeps working.
  - shawnz 8y ago
    It seems like you're talking about the fact that they dropped 16-bit compatibility in 64-bit editions. XP was the first consumer version of Windows with 64-bit support so that timeline would fit. There were various significant technical challenges which caused them to drop 16-bit support in 64-bit Windows and I don't think it's fair to imply that they lost their focus on backwards compatibility just because of that one regression.
    - userbinator 8y ago
      There were various significant technical challenges which caused them to drop 16-bit support in 64-bit Windows That's the official answer. The more nuanced and correct answer is that DOS (16-bit realmode) apps won't work due to the hardware lacking the functionality --- blame AMD, not Microsoft, for that --- but there's no such limitation for Win16 (16-bit protected mode) apps. Thus, WINE on a 64-bit Linux will handle 64, 32, and 16-bit Windows apps, and there's no emulation unlike with DOSbox and such: https://www.dkia.at/en/node/180 https://www.dkia.at/en/node/180 (Coincidentally, I recently made a comment on another article about the nuanced nature of the word "supported": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19578503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19578503 )
      - coldacid 8y ago
        To add even more nuance, even protected mode 16-bit Windows ran Windows apps in v86 mode. Essentially protected mode was a hypervisor you could launch from DOS and your actual Windows session would run on top of that. Before the VT-x extensions to x86-64, there was no more access to virtual-86 if you were running the processor in 64-bit long mode. Considering that, it's no surprise that 16-bit Windows apps would no longer run on 64-bit Windows, especially since NTVDM was necessary to run them on 32-bit NT based versions of Windows anyway.

On windows 10, I was unable to install "Flight Simulator 2004" that I bought in 2007. Have you tried to install Word 6 (mid 90s) or visual studio 1.52 on windows 10 ?

Crinus 8y ago

16bit Windows software will not work natively on 64bit Windows. However this isn't a recent change, this is happening since the introduction of 64bit Windows and consumers started getting 64bit Windows already for more than a decade ago. There are solutions, however. For 16bit Windows software you can try https://github.com/otya128/winevdm https://github.com/otya128/winevdm which provides 16bit emulation and pass-through of Windows API calls to a mix of Wine and Win32 native calls. It isn't perfect but it can run a lot of Windows 3.x software. You can either drag-drop the executable on the emulator's exe file or use the supplied registry files to install it system-wide. DOS software tends to work fine under DOSBox or vDos (a DOSBox fork explicitly made for text-based DOS applications). Now i'm not saying you cannot find cases where stuff do not work, but in my experience most stuff work out of the box or with little tweaks.

shawnz 8y ago
Interesting project, thanks for the link

keypusher 8y ago

There's plenty of good reasons to bash Microsoft, but 'lack of backwards compatibility' just isn't one of them. If anything, I think their obsession with backwards compatibility drove a lot of compromised design decisions at that company.

reacweb 8y ago
History of Microsoft is very long. Backwards compatibility was excellent until windows XP (included). This focus on compatibility has largely disappeared in more recent versions. I am not bashing Microsoft. I love visual studio code. I love the fact that I can edit office documents (powerpoint and word) for free using chrome on ubuntu. Maybe the work Microsoft is doing on Windows Subsystem for Linux will make me come back to windows one day.
- Crinus 8y ago
  Why do you think backwards compatibility dropped? Just recently they decided to not build newer versions of .NET Framework on top of .NET Core (even though they have open sourced practically everything on .NET) to ensure that older programs built on .NET Framework will keep working and wont face issues from any incompatibility with .NET Core. IMO they are making their life a lot harder by introducing all those frameworks and platforms every five years or so, but despite that they still make sure that stuff keeps working.
- shawnz 8y ago
  It seems like you're talking about the fact that they dropped 16-bit compatibility in 64-bit editions. XP was the first consumer version of Windows with 64-bit support so that timeline would fit. There were various significant technical challenges which caused them to drop 16-bit support in 64-bit Windows and I don't think it's fair to imply that they lost their focus on backwards compatibility just because of that one regression.
  - userbinator 8y ago
    There were various significant technical challenges which caused them to drop 16-bit support in 64-bit Windows That's the official answer. The more nuanced and correct answer is that DOS (16-bit realmode) apps won't work due to the hardware lacking the functionality --- blame AMD, not Microsoft, for that --- but there's no such limitation for Win16 (16-bit protected mode) apps. Thus, WINE on a 64-bit Linux will handle 64, 32, and 16-bit Windows apps, and there's no emulation unlike with DOSbox and such: https://www.dkia.at/en/node/180 https://www.dkia.at/en/node/180 (Coincidentally, I recently made a comment on another article about the nuanced nature of the word "supported": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19578503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19578503 )
    - coldacid 8y ago
      To add even more nuance, even protected mode 16-bit Windows ran Windows apps in v86 mode. Essentially protected mode was a hypervisor you could launch from DOS and your actual Windows session would run on top of that. Before the VT-x extensions to x86-64, there was no more access to virtual-86 if you were running the processor in 64-bit long mode. Considering that, it's no surprise that 16-bit Windows apps would no longer run on 64-bit Windows, especially since NTVDM was necessary to run them on 32-bit NT based versions of Windows anyway.