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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>Why is it that a much more powerful laptop can’t deal with software my PC had no problems with 20 years ago?
It can. If it couldn’t, DOSBox wouldn’t have helped. But software needs a compatible operating environment in which to run. There comes a point where maintaining compatibility in newer versions of the OS stops being cost effective to support, so it gets dropped.
Games consoles are a different matter, as not only are their software environments different but often their hardware architecture too – the chips effectively speak different languages, so code written for one will be incomprehensible to the other, even if it is more powerful. (Some recent systems, like PS4/5 and the entire XBox line have adopted more PC-like architecture, and differ less from each other, which is one of the reasons they’ve seen better cross-generation compatibility).
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