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True. I just assumed that 16-bit support got dropped since Windows 11 was 64-bit only.


Microsoft decided not to type "make" for NTVDM on 64-bit versions of Windows (I would argue arbitrarily). It has been unofficially built for 64-bit versions of Windows as a proof-of-concept: https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64


That’s okay, and if people want to test their specific use case on that and use it then great.

It’s a pretty different amount of effort to Microsoft having to do a full 16 bit regression suite and make everything work and then support it for the fewer and fewer customers using it. And you can run a 32 bit windows in a VM pretty easily if you really want to.


Or you can run 16-bit Windows 3.1 in DOSBox.


Sure, but again that’s on you to test and support.


> Microsoft decided not to type "make" for NTVDM on 64-bit versions of Windows (I would argue arbitrarily).

I recently discovered that Windows 6.2 (more commonly known as Windows 8) added an export to Kernel32.dll called NtVdm64CreateProcessInternalW.

https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/win32/kernel32...

Not sure exactly what it does (other than obviously being some variation on process creation), but the existence of a function whose name starts with NtVdm64 suggests to me that maybe Microsoft actually did have some plan to offer a 64-bit NTVDM, but only abandoned it after they’d already implemented this function.




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