I downloaded an old PC game onto my laptop and had to use DOS Box to run it, because Windows 11 wouldn’t allow a 16-bit application to run.
Why is it that a much more powerful laptop can’t deal with software my PC had no problems with 20 years ago? Same thing with backwards-compatible video games.
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Your problem is not the hardware it is the operating system.
Think of it like a sandwich or a burger or some other food related stack. The operating system runs on top of the hardware and the application runs on top of the Operating system.
The hardware is at the bottom, the OS in the middle and the app on top. The app never speaks directly to the hardware (normally) it only talks to the OS. You can switch out the bottom layer without affecting the top one since they don’t touch.
You could totally wipe your laptop and install old MSDOS 6.21 or Windows 98 as an OS on it and your old game will run on that.
You might even Install a 32-bit version of Windows 10 on the laptop and get your 16-bit application to run on that if you are lucky.
The hardware isn’t really the problem. the problem is that the application was designed to run on a certain OS and expects parts of the OS to be there.
If you are running Windows as an OS you can run old applications from quite some time ago, but there are limits.
For example a 64-bit windows OS will only run 64 and 32 bit apps. The old 16 bit stuff from the 90s will no longer run on modern 64 bit windows OS directly.
You can however still run the old stuff on your new 64-bit OS via virtualization. This mostly involves adding another layer to the stack described above. a piece of software that pretends to be Hardware to the layer above it and allows you to install different and old operating systems to run on the fake hardware.
You can run an entire fake computer on your computer and run the old OS and software from over a quarter of a century ago on that.
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