Anything Direct Draw related will be mapped into OpenGL under Unix giving you decent speeds. On Windows it will be a crawling slideshow because from Windows 8 and up it will use a really dog slow software mode with no acceleration at all, worse than plain VESA. Yes, you can reuse WineD3D DLL's on Windows and run these game in a fast way, but not by default, it's a Win32 port of some Wine libraries.
I had to use WineD3D's ddraw.dll among another one to run these touch based arcade machine games with card games, Trivial Pursuit, hangman and the like. If not the game made for w98/2k would really lag even under an i3.
The same with some multimedia CD's from its day. Scummvm it's partially implementing Macromedia Director support but the mentioned game had a custom engine. The Scummvm devs would RE in few weeks (it's a simple 2D game bundle, nothing difficult, with virtually no animations, almost everything it's still images) but no one began yet.
It certainly runs 16-bit Windows games better than Windows 11, which can't run them at all. Not that there are a ton of those, but it's still pretty neat that they work.
The thing that you're missing is that Microsoft used to ship that emulator with Windows. Then they stopped doing that.
AFAICT, Wine can run WIN16 programs. I don't know if it can run DOS programs. There's a WineHQ wiki page that says it can load DOS programs, but various internet fora seem to believe that Wine's DOS support is pretty broken. I've never tried it, and have no DOS programs handy, so I can't verify those claims.
Time to dust off my cd copy of Stars! (From the disk backup, the cd had terminal illnesses and has died). The only win16 game I've ever seen distributed on CDROM. Wine already ran it ok (iirc there were some issues but nothing gamebraking), but now it can do so without i386 libs.
MS got such a black eye for that that they're developing a build of windows specifically for handhelds, optimized, without the bloat and power hungry extras. Would be nice if it ran on laptops
Anything Direct Draw related will be mapped into OpenGL under Unix giving you decent speeds. On Windows it will be a crawling slideshow because from Windows 8 and up it will use a really dog slow software mode with no acceleration at all, worse than plain VESA. Yes, you can reuse WineD3D DLL's on Windows and run these game in a fast way, but not by default, it's a Win32 port of some Wine libraries.
Once I had to use a Mesa3D build for Windows and use the zink driver to render OpenGL to Vulkan, otherwise it would use Windows' software renderer.
I had to use WineD3D's ddraw.dll among another one to run these touch based arcade machine games with card games, Trivial Pursuit, hangman and the like. If not the game made for w98/2k would really lag even under an i3.
The same with some multimedia CD's from its day. Scummvm it's partially implementing Macromedia Director support but the mentioned game had a custom engine. The Scummvm devs would RE in few weeks (it's a simple 2D game bundle, nothing difficult, with virtually no animations, almost everything it's still images) but no one began yet.
It certainly runs 16-bit Windows games better than Windows 11, which can't run them at all. Not that there are a ton of those, but it's still pretty neat that they work.
16-bit software won't run natively in 64-bit mode. It requires some programmatic emulator, like DosBox. Or am I missing something?
The thing that you're missing is that Microsoft used to ship that emulator with Windows. Then they stopped doing that.
AFAICT, Wine can run WIN16 programs. I don't know if it can run DOS programs. There's a WineHQ wiki page that says it can load DOS programs, but various internet fora seem to believe that Wine's DOS support is pretty broken. I've never tried it, and have no DOS programs handy, so I can't verify those claims.
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Time to dust off my cd copy of Stars! (From the disk backup, the cd had terminal illnesses and has died). The only win16 game I've ever seen distributed on CDROM. Wine already ran it ok (iirc there were some issues but nothing gamebraking), but now it can do so without i386 libs.
Not just ancient games!
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s...
MS got such a black eye for that that they're developing a build of windows specifically for handhelds, optimized, without the bloat and power hungry extras. Would be nice if it ran on laptops
Wine is also the reason why Windows software has more longevity on Mac than Mac software. Like, 32-bit didn't get deprecated in Wine.
If enough people cared it seems like someone would have created a MacOS32 in MacOS64 like WoW64.
I'm guessing it'd be too much reverse-engineering. WoW64 was Microsoft themselves.