Comment by jordand
23 days ago
The full 16bit support here is a big thing especially given 64bit Windows (now everywhere) dropped it. With old games, there's thousands that are 16bit, and even odd cases where the game is 32bit but the installer for it is 16bit.
If I'm not mistaken, 16-bit x86 software cannot naively run in 64-bit mode anyways. It requires an emulator, like DosBox. Wine uses WineVDM. CPU-heavy 16-bit programs, or programs that are sensitive to timing, can be noticeably slower.
The WoW64 including 16 bit support is actually pretty big. Microsoft dropped it years ago.
32 bit game with 16 bit installer has a lot of examples, to the point that Windows has workarounds for common installers.