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Comment by LASR | Hacker News Reader

Whatever one might think of Windows and Microsoft, the idea that you can still run apps that are 30+ years old is incredible.

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I worked on device connectivity in Windows core OS division in the Longhorn/Vista push. I came from the Linux and SunOS world before that. It was simply crazy at the dedication and effort put in to make Windows backwards compatible with whatever old broken and poorly behaving USB and printer device. We would have no-named cheap web cams that didn't function to USB spec but "worked" in Windows 98 that needed to work in Vista while still implementing new secure driver models that broke all cheap device assumptions. It was a long hard trek to get all those devices working.

Did you have to procure a physical library of random devices for that kind of work?

Raymond Chen actually talks about this: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240521-00/?p=10...

They basically had a cart populated with random-ass stuff they found in computer shops to the maximum of the USB spec supported wirh hubs. They inserted the hub and watched Windows crash until everything is fixed and worked, then they started yanking it when it was still discovering devices.

You left out the best part: It was called the "USB Cart of Death"!

Don't know about that commentor but Microsoft definitely had one, since Raymond Chen (main source this AI stole from) talked about it.

We had rooms filled elbow to elbow with rows of shelves with printers on top of printers. Every version imaginable. We had libraries of home routers from any and all manufactures. We had tons of junky usb device, wacky HID contraptions, Mass Storage, whatever. I don't know that we had everything but the thinking was that if any Windows user had one of these then we had a customer we wanted to support with a great experience when they plugged it into Vista. We had pretty amazing telemetry for the time so we did prioritize more common devices. But the long tail we tried to support was very very long. We were fighting a thankless war in the trenches. Vista was hard. Most of the stack and new drivers didn't get fully worked out until win7 shipped.

On behalf of those of us who play old Windows games on newer PCs, esp Vista, thank you!

It's also incredible how quickly a Mac will stop being able to run Mac apps.

This was shocking to me as a gamer who loved Windows and had to use Mac. Rosetta helped for a while. Nowadays it feels like an intentional treadmill to purge any dev not willing to keep up.

Oh yeah, Mac and games don't mix for other reasons besides that too. Like Apple wants devs to use Metal, and devs don't want to use Metal. I occasionally play whatever few games happen to run on my Mac, and that's enough.

Yeah, it makes no sense. The standard is OpenGL, Vulkan, but Apple ditches it just to be different or something. At least some big game engines support it, e.g. OGRE, so if you do want cross-platform dev, it's possible.

Even the cross-platform stuff tends to not support Mac as well. Like CSGO had a Mac version like the other Source-engine games, but it never worked quite right on Mac. I had input lag and inconsistent framerates, and it's not that I cared about winning, but the game was painful to play like that. Game was perfect on the same machine running Windows via Boot Camp.

Also, there's Vulkan on Metal, but there's translation overhead, and I have no idea what other issues it causes. Dolphin emulator did some research on that.

To be fair, Metal came before and inspired the development of Vulkan.

But like USB-C, at some point you should just embrace the industry standard.

Industry standard where? Not for games.

At least USB-C vs Lightning had the dilemma of one phone physically not being able to use both.

Nope, OpenGL and Vulkan are not standards embraced by game developers other than famous folks like Carmack pushing for it, and even him has acknowledged DirectX being much better.

Game consoles don't do Khronos APIs for the most part, they are really only standard on GNU/Linux and Android, really.

Indeed DirectX is king, but OpenGL and Vulkan aren't nothing. There was a long period of time, maybe 2000-2016, when high-budget games being released for Mac wasn't so uncommon, or at least it was more common than today, and those often used OpenGL. Instead of Apple rallying around the only alternatives to DirectX, they made yet another way. I'm assuming Mac games are just not a priority for Apple, which is fine.

Their priority are iDevice games.

No? Mac and games mix great in 2026. I'd wager 90% of games released in the last 30 days on Steam run out of the box under Wine on Mac, or at worst - usually when a custom in-house engine is used, which is now rare - with minimal modifications that Claude will whip up for you. AAA blockbusters and eSports, sure, but all in all that's only a small percentage of games. And of course some of the highest quality AAA games like Baldur's Gate 3 or very popular indie games like Slay the Spire run natively on Mac.

WINE is hilariously a more reliable way to run software on Mac than just making the software natively for Mac. There is software that got released for Mac but you can only run the Windows version on Mac today. A big chunk of that is x86-32.

But I did mean this as part of games not mixing with Mac. You most likely have to run any game in an emulator, and it still maybe doesn't work or is much laggier. It's not just AAA games and cringesports, it's all sorts of popular games. Both AoE2 remakes for example. BeamNG works but not well. Anything with anticheat is a no (last two examples aren't this category btw). I've used WINE like 2008-2022, at some point decided nah, even though Codeweavers have done an amazing job.

Oh and I have no idea what happens when they start removing Rosetta 2 support. Supposedly they will prioritize making certain software work for it, but x86-32 Windows games running in Crossover?

All I can tell you is of the last 10 I tried, all games from the last 10 years, 8 run perfectly fine under Wine on Mac, and 2 of the older ones with a custom inhouse engine for only that game, run perfectly fine after telling an agent to make it work. This is not even using CrossOver, I'm talking free. These games are all from different developers.

I'm sure there are games that don't work but it's a minority of new Steam releases even if you exclude pure slop.

Which games?

FOSS devs don't want to use Metal.

Gamedevs already have Metal support on their engines, they don't spend time with API wars like FOSS communities.

Game devs also don't bother making their games work for Mac (or Linux). I keep hearing that the engines support Metal and this is no problem, but then there are still no Mac games. Edit: Especially Valve, big game company that used to make Mac versions and seemingly gave up.

Because the money is on iOS, which also uses Metal.

Well they'll jump through whatever hoops for iOS for that reason. But that's also a mostly separate set of games from desktop.

Doesn't matter, it is still Metal.

Just like, Khronos APIs are largely irrelevant in game consoles, and Windows.

Even on the Switch that does Vulkan and GL, NVN is the main API for those that want full control over the hardware.

And as note,

https://asomobile.net/en/blog/mobile-gaming-market-in-2026-t...

> intentional treadmill to purge any dev not willing to keep up

It is. Both Apple and Google will push apps off their stores that have not been updated in "a while". Even if the app works fine and is perfectly finished.

My kid's a big fan of original StarCraft, which is now going on 28 years old.

I think you need an emulator to run Civ1, though. My kid was asking if we could try it and I'm like "I don't think I can find that on Steam..."

Civ1 was for DOS, but CivNet is almost Civ1 and was for windows... But maybe win16 and you'd need winevdm or something if your install is 64-bit.

AFAIK, you can run Civ1 (and other 16-bit games & applications) on Windows 10/11 in 3 ways:

1. Run CivWin on WineVDM: WineVDM, also known as OTVDM (Old 16-bit Windows Virtual Machine), is a compatibility layer that allows users to run many legacy 16-bit Windows applications on modern 64-bit Windows systems. CivWin is the Windows re-release of Civ1, that's recommended due to its high resolution support (e.g., you can play it in HD with cool mods) and some people like the final multiplayer CivNet release too. Credit: @Blake00 on this thread: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/using-winevdm-to-play... https://winevdm.com/does-winevdm-work-on-windows-11/

2. DosBox (get the D-Fend Reloaded frontend/GUI, it contains DosBox): https://dfendreloaded.sourceforge.io/ https://www.dosbox.com/mown/index.php

3. VirtualBox or VMWare (virtual machines solution) to install and run a copy of Windows 95/98.

Note that Microsoft removed support for 16-bit subsystems from 64-bit editions of Windows many years ago, beginning with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

See archive.org [0], eXoDOS, or eBay and DOSBox-X.

[0] https://archive.org/details/CIVILIZATION_201902

What's even more impressive is that those apps weren't necessarily written with long-term compatibility in mind

"We do not break userspace" to the extreme.

I always wondered why win11 is so slow, may be this is one of the primary reason

Also Windows has a huge community of people who will help you.

With Linux you're stuck trying to decipher the ramblings of neckbeards.

it's not 1999 anymore, we've already moved past the golden era of stackoverflow and forums to support Linux & Windows questions into a new dawn of poorly sourced reddit bot comments.

We're passed reddit bots. Now we're onto mysteriously sourced AI summaries.

Even pre AI spam, Reddit was almost useless for technical advice. Absolute last resort unless I was going to try Quora next.

I really want to believe you and that I've just missed the magic support forums but trying to find answers to problems on Windows is just a million forums of the same essentially "turn it off and on again" advice

Linux forums might be obtuse but at least they'll have actual technical details about the problem. Almost without fail any "fix" they propose won't work on your system because it's for a different distro that was EoL 5 years ago but they'll at least give you something to work with.

I found all of the above to be lacking years ago tbh no matter what platform the advice was for. I'm really glad now that I can just go back and forth with even a free-tier chatbot for 2-3 messages to fix any fixable problem, or just have a cursor agent tinker with it interactively until it's fixed.

I know what you're talking about. Microsoft is so large, that the smallest of gaps are enough for ecosystems to form around and provide people a living.

For example, people trawling the Microsoft Q&A forum for low hanging fruit to provide advice to and build out their little home computer repair business profile.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/tags/824/windows-h...

Some of these answers are really dubious. Some of these questions are really dubious.

Yeah this completely matches my experience. Questions lacking essential details or followup, answers that are some kind of professional help who don't actually know anything.

And now with AI answers...

No, you're almost completely screwed if you're at the point of looking for non-trivial Windows help online. But you're also way less likely to be in that situation with Windows vs with Linux.

No, it's just lost, the old windows forums went offline. Technet was poorly archived too, that was all lost.

There is so much obscure windows crap that can be found in the old internet.

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