Project Outline - Aquilafer/oss-repo-template GitHub Wiki

The Problem

When I was young, I had a bunch of old CD computer games that I would play on the family computer. When I (recently) went back to play them for nostalgia sake, they would not run. More research showed that it was because modern 64-bit Windows does not support 16-bit Windows applications.

Existing Software

I tried to circumvent the problem by using a virtual machine, but it was too slow to play many of the games. Also, the process of setting up the virtual box required a decent amount of technical expertise and required an old version of Windows which isn't cheap (assuming that one uses legal methods). There is also DOSBox (a DOS emulator), but many games aren't quite old enough to support DOS meaning that one would still need to install Windows 3.1 or something. Versions of Windows this old kind of have to be pirated as nobody really sells them any-more. On Linux, there is a Windows emulator called WINE which can run 16-bit Windows perfectly well, except it is built for Linux, not Windows, and although I'm okay with a dual boot on my machine, I don't know if many people with old games really want to bother with installing a new operating system for the singular purpose of playing old Windows games.

Goal

I want to make something like WINE, but just for emulating 16-bit Windows and built for the Windows operating system.