Windows 10: Does 16 bit work yet on a 64 bit windows 10 OS?

I understand the above real well surprisingly for me.

I hope this is correct. I am assuming that the emulation done for the Windows 64 bit operating system so it can still support 32 bit applications. SysWow64

I also have been reading about wine. They are working on system called Wine64, it suppose to work with 64 bit, 32 bit and 16 bit applications it is just in the early development stages. This is not just for Linux.

One person had developed a NTVDM64 but I don't know how it works or if it still in development or been abandoned.

 

Technically, when its in 32-bit mode (which is the same thing as "legacy mode" which I mentioned before) its not natively running 16-bit code either. Its being run through NTDVM.

 

You are confusing the term "virtual machine" with "emulation". NTVDM does not "emulate" 16 bit applications, in that it is not interpreting code programmatically. It is running the code "natively", but doing so in a 'virtualized' environment.

When running software such as DOSbox, IIRC, then the code is actually interpreted and completely emulated. This is not "native" because the CPU is not executing the instructions natively.

 

You're not really listening. I said quite clearly above "incapable of natively running 16 bit applications when running 64 bit operating systems". That part is important. The CPU is very capable of running 32 bit and 16 bit applications, but NOT when running in 64 bit mode (which is what happens when you have a 64 bit OS).

 

I assume you mean it is the operating system that tells the cpu what mode to use. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to run 32 bit operating systems on a 64 bit machine.

 

Not exactly, it's the bootstrapper that initializes the CPU in either 64 bit or 32 bit mode on startup, once in that mode it must either load a 64 bit OS or 32/16 bit OS respectively (a 32 bit OS cannot run in 64 bit mode, and a 64 bit OS cannot run in 32 bit mode). Once the 64 bit OS is running, it can run 32 bit applications in the SysWOW64 layer (Wow stands for Windows on Windows, a sort of virtualized Windows running within Windows using the x86-64 ability to virtualize 32 bit applications in 64 bit mode). But it cannot run 16 bit applications. Once a 32 bit OS is running, it can virtualize 16 bit applications, but not 64 bit apps.

So think of it as the OS can only run the "bitness" of one level lower than it, and that's how the CPU itself works.