Comment by el_peaton
18 hours ago
While I haven't daily driven Windows in years and am usually the first to criticize Microsoft. You have to give credit where credit is due; Windows backwards compatibility is simply nuts. I had never run into compatibility issues with programs or games built for older Windows version, nor have I heard of anyone who did.
Some games that ran on Vista, can run under Wine, but not on Windows 11. The backwards compatibility story has changed in the last few years.
Games for Windows, can’t play any of those anymore without cracking them since the severs got turned off.
To be fair, that is not a backwards compatibility problem and is because the games were designed with an unnecessary reliance on a third party service to run.
I'd like to know which ones you've had issues with. I've compiled a collection of hundreds of Windows games from ~96-2006 and I've only run into one that's required an appcompat flag (carmageddon 2).
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and a lot of other early Source games will just outright crash.
Crysis Wars, Word '03, the Saboteur are all in a similar boat.
They're not address aware, meaning they overallocate at launch, and Windows handling of 32bit compatibility is dead end code that hasn't been worked on in decades. These are 64bit executables, with 32bit memory mapping inside them.
My dad had trouble getting the Panzer General / other General Series to run.
iirc, the installer is 16-bit, there's problems with too much disk space and/or too much ram, and then there's cryptic error messages. Oh and the please don't run this on WindowsNT message.
We did find something 3rd party that uses the assets, so all wasn't lost, but ...
Windows has a reputation for amazing back compat, and it's pretty good, but it's not really surprising to find things that don't work. Especially games from that era, there are common issues that come up a lot, but afaik, there's no microsoft compat option to lie about disk space, ram, or vram ... or it doesn't automatically trigger at least.
Heroes of Might and Magic 3
> I had never run into compatibility issues with programs or games built for older Windows version
Try running a real-mode Windows program on a modern version of Windows.
Intel backwards compatibility has meant that real mode is still with us more of less, but to give context to people who aren't as familiar: real mode was superseded by protected mode with the introduction of the 80286, in 1982.
I believe Microsoft removed support for 16bit Windows applications some time ago.
The hardware may be willing but the software is now incapable.
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You just need to install 86Box as a compatibility layer. Everything runs perfectly.
You only have to copy-paste one .exe file and then you can launch your app from Windows, that’s it. Sounds perfectly reasonable.
86box is a PC emulator, not a compatibility layer.
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For sure.
Not building NTVDM for 64-bit Windows was a major departure from previous strategy and marks a clear regression in Microsoft's attitudes toward backwards compatibility.
> and marks a clear regression in Microsoft's attitudes toward backwards compatibility.
Yeah... but for what purpose should it have been kept? Anyone with a legitimate need to run 16 bit software on a modern Windows machine can always go for virtualization or emulation. The effort required in supporting that technology is far from zero, and old code to work with legacy stuff - no matter in which project - is always a fruitful source of security exploits.
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A ton of things broke for me when they restricted writing to the program files directory with XP.
Lots of old games dont work anymore, but you can still run them by compabtibility modes.
16 bit programs dont seem to work at all though - you need wine or dosbox