Comment by AndrewDavis
Comment by AndrewDavis 3 days ago
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.
Comment by AndrewDavis 3 days ago
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.
Do you mean winevdm? https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
Wine itself doesn't run on Windows AFAIK.
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).
and Linux stopped supporting 32bit x86 I think around the same time? (just i386?)
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.
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.
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.
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.