Wouldn’t they be easier to run since computers are better now?
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A lot of old programs didn’t use the approved programming interfaces. Instead they would use various tricks with the operating system or hardware to do things faster, and the tricks often don’t work with newer systems.
I remember one old program that decided to check for free disk space by accessing parts of the disk file system by itself instead of using the approved OS routine for determining free disk space. The user upgraded his computer and his file system to FAT32, and suddenly the program would no longer install because it was written to calculate free disk space using the FAT file system.
I also had an old game that was tied to very old video cards for video acceleration (it used to be like that). Luckily, the game had an option to run without video acceleration, so it would work just fine on a newer computer because the new CPUs were faster than the old GPUs. But it wouldn’t have run at all without that option.
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