Did you ever load up your modern Windows 10 PC, ready to install your favourite application or game, only to be greeted by a dialog telling you it won’t run, and then you realise you’re trying to run a 16 bit application on your modern 64 bit Windows 10 installation?
I swear to god, this happens to me all the time.
Luckily, there’s a solution to this problem. In fact, there’s multiple solutions to this problem. Of course, you can always just fire up a virtual machine with 32 bit Windows, Windows 3.1, or OS/2 for massive style points, but that’s cumbersome and uncool (except for OS/2. OS/2 is always cool). There’s a better way.
Enter winevdm by otya128, which is a combination of MAME’s i386 emulation and the 16 bit part of wine. It allows you to run 16 bit applications on modern 64 bit versions of Windows. Edward Mendelson created a handy installer with some additional useful tools to make the process even easier.
As a sidenote, there’s also NTVDMx64, which is a version of Microsoft’s own NTVDM (Windows NT’s virtual DOS machine) adapted for 64 bit (Mendelson made a handy installer for this one, too). By its very nature, NTVDMx64 doesn’t run Windows 16 bit applications; only DOS ones. It is also important to note that NTVDMx64 is based on leaked Windows NT source code, so please be careful in which settings you use it.
There’s no real reason I’m talking about this today, other than the fact I that I ran into this stuff a few days ago when watching a YouTube video about running the IBM WorkPlace Shell for Windows 3.x on Windows 10, and thought it was fascinating. It might prove useful for some of you working at companies still running old 16 bit stuff, or if you’re digging around in your old floppy collection.
There is also Win3mu
https://www.toptensoftware.com/win3mu/
Hmmmm, deja vu? 😉
https://www.osnews.com/story/130237/freedoss-linux-roots/
(doesn’t look like I can link directly to comments)
If you open up the DOM inspector, you’ll find an ID like
comment-10406260that you can use as a fragment identifier in your URLs. It’s just not exposed in a ready-made hyperlink by the OSNews WordPress template.That said, please quote anyway, to ensure links don’t break when OSNews does their next big change. I’ve got a ton of TODO bookmarks that only work with the help of the Wayback Machine.
Yeah, I’ve done some WP theme development before (though it’s been a few years… thankfully, these days I actively avoid WP if I can help it) & had a look in the page source, but it looks like OSNews’ current theme is missing a named anchor for individual comments.
> Of course, you can always just fire up a virtual machine with 32 bit Windows, Windows 3.1, or OS/2 for massive style points, but that’s cumbersome and uncool
Nowadays, I’ve found virtual machines much less cumbersome than all that wine based mess, especially getting them up and running from a backup, and having multiple virtual machines running on the same pc for some hotseat multiplayer is decidedly very cool.
It does, however, require you to have the correct licenses or be willing to ignore the law… and those OSes tend not to have the guest extensions required for things like seamless mouse interoperability, shared clipboard, and the like.
Another interesting option to run 16bit MS-DOS executables is MS-DOS Player by Takeda Toshiya. It can also wrap the Player to the old EXE, creating a new EXE file that can be run directly. It’s very handy for any kind of old scripts/utilities.
There’s also a corresponding tool to run 8bit CP/M stuff.
http://takeda-toshiya.my.coocan.jp/
I guess that a Windows 95 application that is a mix of 16-bit and 32-bit code won’t run, right?
I haven’t found a way to virtualize Windows 95 applications that are a mix of 16-bit and 32-bit code and use Direct3D. Because compatibility layers rarely implement the win32 part of Windows 95 completely and VMs don’t do 3D acceleration on Windows 95.
For these apps it’s either fanmade patch found on PCgamingwiki or real hardware.
Have you tried using 32-bit Windows XP? That should be new enough for a VM to provide 3D guest drivers, yet still supports 16-bit thunking and has the best compatibility options of any 32-bit Windows.
Lots of Windows 95 apps do not work in XP (even in “compatibility mode”) due to using obscure Direct3D modes not supported by Windows XP’s Direct3D (for example Colin Mc Rae Rally) or due to other problems. There were fanmade patches even in the Windows XP era to make Windows 95 games run.
Unfortunately not every Windows 95 game has a patch even for Windows XP.
o0 The installer links are dead…
Agree. “OS/2 is always cool” !!!
Meanwhile on 64-bit GNU/Linux you can run 16-bit Windows applications on Wine without any CPU emulation!