twiz11 wrote:

https://sourceforge.net/p/nxvdm/wiki/Home/

I found a way to get 16 bit apps to run in windows but its sketchy, you have to disable the buffer protection and let the apps directly access the hardware

Not really sketchy. Just how it has to be done as direct access to hardware has been blocked in Windows since forever.

Sounds cool, reminds me a bit of MS-DOS Player, which also is command line related.
In addition, OTVDM/WineVDM project can help to restore functionality of WoW (Windows on Windows).
The real WoW (modified Win 3.1x) used to run atop the old NTVDM that older Windows NT releases (MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC and x86).

Edit: Porttalk runtime can be used to allow direct access in Windows NT, by the way.
For example, to gain direct access to PC Speaker (old games played music through it) or
COM-Port / Parallel-Port (used by Win9x programs for devices such as EPROM writers).

Edit: OS/2 Warp had a much better VDM, by the way. 😉
It could do neat things like both emulating and passing-through VGA BIOS
or emulating a CGA machine with 704KiB of DOS memory.
Also, ODIN project adds support for Win32 programs.