Comment by naikrovek 3 days ago
It’s not baffling at all. They strongly value maintaining backwards compatibility guarantees.
For example, Windows 11 has no backwards compatibility guarantees for DOS but operating systems that they do have backwards compatibility guarantees for do.
Enterprises need Microsoft to maintain these for as long as possible.
It is AMAZING how much inertia software has that hardware doesn’t, given how difficult each are to create.
Things that go through the proper channels are usually compatible. Crysis was never the most stable of games and IIRC it used 3DNow, which is deprecated - but not by Windows.
As a counter-anecdata, last week I ran Galapagos: Mendel's Escape with zero compat patches or settings, that's a 1997 3D game just working.
> Things that go through the proper channels are usually compatible.
But that's a pretty low bar - previously Windows went to great lengths to preserve backwards compatibility even for programs that are out of spec.
If you just care about keeping things working if they were done "correctly" then the average Linux desktop can do that too - both for native Linux programs (glibc and a small list of other base system libraries have strong backwards compatibility) as well as for Windows programs via Wine.
Theres a big difference between Enterprise-Level software and games.
Windows earns money mainly in the enterprise sector, so that's where the backwards-compatibility effort is. Not gaming. That's just a side effect.
Anecdotal, you can run 16bit games (swing; 1997) on Windows, only if you patch 2-3 DirectX related files.
The prototypical examples given in the past were for applications like Sim City, hardly bastions of enterprise software.
And with win11, Microsoft stopped shipping 32bit versions of the OS, and since they don't support 16bit mode on 64bit OSes, you actually can't run any 16bit games at all.
Victorian teletypes can be hooked to a serial port with a trivial adapter, at least enough to use CP/M and most single-case OS'es.
Also, some programming languages have a setting to export code compatible with just Baudot characters: http://t3x.org/nmhbasic/index.html
So, you could feed it from paper tape and maybe Morse too.
They've stopped caring as much about backwards compat.
Windows 10 no longer plays the first Crysis without binary patches for instance.