Windows has some pretty amazing backwards compatibility. In many cases, you can run ancient 32-bit Win32 applications just fine on your current system.
However, there’s one issue: If you ever tried to run a 16-bit application from the Windows 3.x days, any 64-bit Windows version (starting from Windows XP) will refuse to run the application with an error message indicating that you should ask the vendor for a compatible version.
On the other hand, the modern 32-bit versions of Windows run these applications just fine.
Thanks to two amazing open-source projects, you can bring back 16-bit compatibility to the 64-bit Windows era.
This one’s from 2022, but apparently, I never mentioned it here on OSNews.
So does this mean we can install WEP?
No this doesn’t have anything to do with drivers.
Sorry should’ve been more specific: [Windows Entertainment Pack: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Entertainment_Pack.
I had no idea what you were talking about either. The way you said it, I’m assuming it was popular? I’m not old enough to remember windows 3.1 that well, random bits here and there, haha.
I used DOS quite a bit however, both for gaming and learning to program..
Dunno about Microsoft Entertainment Pack but we had Galaxy of Games Arcade Action… which was a compilation of mostly windows 3.1 games (some if not most of the games were clunky or ill explained of course) https://archive.org/details/cdrom-galaxy-arcade-action
Prarie Dog Hunt was probably the most played game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNScFkLFp80
“This one’s from 2022, but apparently, I never mentioned it here on OSNews.”
Not this one. But another :
https://www.osnews.com/story/131469/running-16-bit-windows-applications-on-64-bit-windows/
You can test how effective it is (run CASTLE1.BAT or CASTLE2.BAT) :
https://github.com/Kochise/win_portable/tree/master/Game/castlotw
I’ve ran word 5.0 with it and wierdly enough it causes the modern office 365 plugins to load when you want to say insert a table into word which is kinda crazy that it still works.
I don’t know why Microsoft doesn’t build something like this into Windows; it would make their 64-bit OS considerably less crap by expanding the list of compatible apps by many thousands.