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Comment by worthless-trash | Hacker News Reader

What direction is its backwards compatability going ?

Worse. Windows 10 dropped 16-bit application support.

You mean a 64bit architecture literally cannot handle an 8bit instruction as its smallest register is 16bit without swapping modes?

This is an architectural problem not an OS constraint.

And they're completely correct to abandon this software in my honest opinion as the developers already have.

If you need this run a 32bit VM under the 64bit OS so the virtualised CPUs can handle the 16bit application.

You mean a 64bit architecture literally cannot handle an 8bit instruction as its smallest register is 16bit without swapping modes?

Where did you get that piece of misinformation from? 64-bit x86 can handle 64, 32, 16, and 8-bit data just fine, and its instructions are still byte-aligned.

Also, the decision to remove 16-bit support from 64-bit Windows was entirely political. NTVDMx64 adds it back.

After further reading, yes I am wrong! Thanks

I believe Intel is working on an arch change to drop 32 bit entirely in an upcoming architecture.

You mean Windows 11, since it has no 32-bit version - Windows 10 32-bit still supports 16-bit apps:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/ntvd...

My first thought was “what’s a 16-bit app?” That tells you my age range.

Good(?) news: Even ten years from now, you'll find machine tools and other industrial applications running 16 bit software in prod.

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