Hacker News Reader

To play older Windows games that for various reasons won't run on Windows 10, for example.

The conventional wisdom has always been that Microsoft is hyper-focused on backwards compatibility, but there's only limited truth in that. Even if you pick Windows XP as a starting point (just considering NT kernels), tons of stuff broke with Vista.

Compatibility Mode has never been very good, though I don't think there's anything preventing Microsoft from making a more Wine-like compatibility layer if they really wanted to.

Microsoft provides a free Windows XP SP3 virtual machine image to run on Windows 7:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=800...

I'm not sure if the same thing is still available for Windows 10.

Nope. Reserved to Win7 (and then; only Pro). Even third party VM software able to run it implements a custom check to make sure your host is Win7 otherwise they refuse to run it. This is quite concerning, from a backward compat POV, because it means that it only has deferred the incompatibilities it proposed to solve, and that deferring is completely artificial.

Honestly MS is not that good on backward compat. They are good on the story, so/so on the facts. But I prefer that to being stuck in the dark ages of poor design and the poor security which comes with.

Absurdly funny, but true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com