I hear a lot about Windows backwards compatibilyty, but i don't think it has ever actualy worked for me. Every time i tried to install a program meant for anything older then win7/win10 i get some cryptic error and end up using a VM.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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While not confirmed (AFAIK), it's likely we went from Windows 8 straight to 10. With 95/98 being so similar, it wasn't rare for software to recognize it by looking for "Windows 9" in the OS name.
Windows after launching the exe: Monitor flickers, mouse freezes and here is free blue screen!
free blue screen
i assume the non free blue screen displays ads before the system crashes
Are you sure you don't work for the Microsoft marketing and sales departments somewhere? This sounds like something they'd try.
also the reason you can still find a dialogue window from like Win95 lol, people often whine how Windows doesn't look as pretty as MacOS, but I think that's just the price for crazy backwards compatibility.
if they remove those old elements, I'd bet people are gonna rage about how their old games or software no longer work.
Actually, a lot of games arent really working that great on Windows either, Windows 7 games tend to not work at all sometimes.
A lot of companies still use Windows XP and 7 for their programs. Seems like Windows is really backward compatible (it isn't)
That's because somewhere deep inside every x64/x86 compatible processor is an 8086 from 1980. The architecture has more or less remained the same for 40 years with more and more shit piled on top.
You can literally still natively boot DOS from a floppy on a modern PC if you can get it to recognize and boot from a USB floppy drive and it has legacy boot enabled. You wont get very far without drivers for anything, but you'll get to the command prompt.
Ideas for a new platform are still out there: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisioning-future-simplified-architecture.html
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I tried to install Civilization 2 from a CD on Windows 10. It didn't work.
there's workaround but it's a pain in the ass... https://www.myabandonware.com/game/sid-meier-s-civilization-ii-453
basically
- the game use old
.bindisk file, you must convert it to.iso - mount the
.iso - run the
setup.exeto install Civilization II
I'm unsure if this is doable with Windows, but when using wine there's a simple workaround for this:
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=4849
Mostly it boils down to copy the whole civ2 directory as-is.
Oooh, I'm gonna have to try this later (I wish Kbin had a save button like lemmy does)
i emulated it on macos just fine :)
Yeah it sure can install these programs but thei'll either run like dogshit or not at all.
Yes, install your 25-year-old software on your 30-year-old NTFS filesystem (it's that old).
EDIT: I just looked it up and NTFS turns 30 on July 27th, 2023 LOL
Weren't they working on some database-like replacement for it a while ago?
Maybe so, but all that spaghetti code to ensure the backwards compatibility comes at a cost of endless Windows jank.
I use both Windows and Mac machines for my audio work and while everything is consistently just 'plug and play' on my Mac, on the PC side I'm constantly fighting a losing battle with Windows ASIO audio driver issues, multi-monitor issues, Microsoft constantly asking me to make an account every 3 days...
For gaming, I love Windows. Still yet to find anything it does better and with less fuss than MacOS in a work environment though.
I'm playing first Doom (yeah that Doom from 1993) on my laptop with Win 10
To be fair a pc playing doom isn't that impressive. That game runs on litterally everything
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My dosbox and multiple attempts to build VMs of windows 3.1 say this isn't completely true
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