Talk:Virtual DOS machine

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I'm sorry, but Windows XP does contain an NTVM.exe, located in the Windows system 32 directory.

[Timbo] Another thing is that Vista must have some sort of 16 bit VDM because 16 bit applications developed at my work run on Vista (Beta). I understand MS doesn't support 16 bit on Vista but it works. Anyone got an idea why this might be?

Wild guess: WoW/NTVDM happen to work in your beta build of Vista. Since Microsoft says 16-bit will not be supported in Vista, I'm guessing they'll remove them before shipping Vista. It may also be the case that WoW/NTVDM actually continue to work even in the final version of Vista (but without being installed), and MS just decides not to give any official support anymore. After all, it's not like they'll deliberately break support for 16-bit, they just don't want to have it hanging around their necks anymore. JRM · Talk 22:53, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[David Vallner] The Overview section seems wrong to me: I have had games in resolutions above 320x200 (specifically Legend Entertainment titles like Death Gate) run with the NTVDM on Windows XP, and problems with timing are very, very, very rare - the 386 and various variants of the 486, all with wildly varying clock speeds coexisted in the CPU market for a long time, and games made around that period don't use timing loops in engines - in theory they would run faster if they did, but from personal experience most games I ever tried ran fine in that respect. I'm a bit too newbly to slap a factual accuracy dispute on the article or just edit it in, so I'm posting that here in case someone that can reformulate this into an objective POV comes across it. 20:28, 14 Aug 2006 (CEST)

[edit] Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

It's not like M$ is deliberately dropping support for 16-bit apps in 64-bit Windows. It's the hardware (CPU) that simply does not support running 16-bit code while in 64-bit mode. M$ guys had no choice - it is simply impossible to natively run 16-bit code on a 64-bit x86 OS. - Anonymous 14:31, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Not correct: On pages 3-1 and 3-2 in "Intel's Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual Volume 1: Basic Architecture"[1], they state that real mode and protected mode are still supported, and that a compatibility mode is available allowing a 64 bit OS to run 32 bit and 16 bit applications.  —CobraA1 21:49, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Not true. It's possible to run a virtualisation application such as DOSBox or Virtual PC on x64 Windows, which in turn can run DOS or Windows 9x which rely on 16-bit code. The x86-64 and Long mode articles both correctly claim it is possible. I'd say Microsoft just didn't want to have two separate WOW emulation layers. Karsini (talk) 23:06, 28 November 2007 (UTC)