bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-07, 19:31:
I have some very good words for Microsofts excellent retro compatibility of their applications, I mean, its 2020, and even some 16-bit apps made by them 30 years ago still work on Windows 10.
Well, yes, but support is kinda medicore, at best. Also, application compatibility in itself is the main reason for Windows to still exist. 😉
As for DOS/Win16, they had the SoftPC emulation core since the 90s, but didn't even bother to make it work with the x86-64 releases of Windows 2000/Windows XP:
Instead, they claimed removal of 16-Bit compatibility was unavoidable and necessary due to the missing of V86 in Long Mode..
Which was just a lame excuse., IMHO. Pure 16-bit Protected Mode code, as used by Windows 3.1/Windows 3.1 apps in Standard-Mode, was/is perfectly legal in Long Mode.
In a similar fashion to Concurrent DOS -which supported multitasking of DOS applications on a 286-, it surely would have been possible
to make a modified Win16 sub system run natively on x86-64. Remember, DOS in NTVDM always had been synthetic, too, so is adaptable by design.
Anyway, even the possibility of emulation was ignored/discarded at the time when it was clear that x86-64 was the way to go.
Users who asked for Win16 support on Windows x64 were often told (by other users, btw) that emulation would be too slow to be useful.
Apparently, these users never ran a RISC flavour of Windows NT or grew up with hardware emulators only (game consoles etc). 😁
That a "slow" performance (-Win3 apps ran on 286 onwards-) would actually be a good thing to get old, timing-sensitive applications to run, apparently only realized a minority of users.
To this very day, users begging for 16-Bit/Legacy support aren't seldom being threaded like fools (described as people who live in the past). 🙁
Newest thing that comes to mind is Windows 10 for ARM. People who're seriously interested in better Win32/Win64 support were/are being offended.
Even though they often only want to run useful GUI applications, that rely on simple API calls rather than heavy x86 calculations (say IrfanView or WinAmp).
(They were not offended by Microsoft, of course. But by other users/fans of ARM platform that believe in a future world without x86.)
PS: Aero Glass/Desktop Window Manager in Vista/7 unintentionally fixed some old Win16 GDI bugs. 😀
So it perhaps makes sense switching on Aero. On Windows 8/10, there's Glass8 and similar programs.
Edit: Small edit.
Edit: Regarding Win16/DOS applications on Windows x64.. It was solved by now. By users.
Thanks to some modified NTVDM and a special port of Wine (otvdm/winevdm). 😀
bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-07, 19:31:
About Apple not so much, they simply don't care (they never cared anyway, if you remember the rosetta fiasco when they switched from PowerPC to Intel).
Well, yes, I think the same in some way or another. On the other hand, someone could says they "learned" from the past.
Mac OS 9, which was decleared "dead" in 2002, was able to execute 68k Mac OS applications from as early as 1984.
Sure, that was perhaps unintentionally because the OS relied on some core system functions that still were made of Motorola 68000 code that had to go trough a built-in emulator.
Last, but not least, the "Classic Environment" (a VM) was supported on all Power PCs running Tiger, including the G5 line, which was unable to natively boot OS 9.
This made it possible to run 68k applications out-of-box up to at least 2007 (last Tiger update, 10.4.11 was released in November of that year).
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