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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The issue here isn’t the hardware. It’s the operating system standing between the program and the hardware.
The program needs to ask the OS for many things, such as memory in which to store data. The OS needs to be able to understand these requests.
Modern iterations of Windows aren’t designed to be backwards compatible in that way because it would be complex and costly to implement, not really be something people care all that much about, and has a simple alternative: emulating an old OS and running the program there, which is what you’re doing.
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