I wish they included an 8086 emulator so that old software compiled for DOS would still run. It worked on 32 bit systems until 32 bit support was dropped, which

I wish they included an 8086 emulator so that old software compiled for DOS would still run. It worked on 32 bit systems until 32 bit support was dropped, which only happened a few years ago. That was due to Intel's virtual 8086 mode, which is not available if your CPU is running in 64 bit (long) mode. Modern computers are fast enough for the emulation overhead to be negligible, even if you don't do any fancy JIT tricks and just go with a switch/case inside a while(true). I would personally make use of this, I know of a 16-bit program whose latest version was released in the late XP days, so it's not even that old. The idea there was that it was always compatible with DOS, some users might presumably still want to run it on DOS, and there's no point in breaking that compatibility if modern Windows can run it just fine. Then development stopped, 64 bit systems got more popular, and a recompiled version was never released. I guess the lesson there is that if you're keeping an API for backwards compatibility, some programmers will refuse to switch to a replacement to make their software work on older systems, making the API impossible to remove down the line without breaking modern programs.