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Comment by mysterydip | Hacker News Reader

Love the test case "but can you run Doom on it?" Great work!

Personally I'd like to see a homebrew OS that attempts some kind of compatibility with 16-bit Windows, with some modern design/conveniences (sortof a ReactOS for the 3.11 world). It seems like people make either 8 bit or 32 bit OSes. Maybe I'm not searching the right terms. Anyone know of anything, or a starting point?

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Thanks! I was going to go similar path you mentioned. Not 16-bit but in a way that is exe-like binaries and development with Visual Studio.

But it seemed to me that it is easier to support ELF binaries. And OSDev has great articles about elf files, binutils, cross-compilers, etc..

can't believe I never checked OSDev before... what a trove of info! I'll spend a while digesting there, thanks!

And deeper down the rabbithole: http://wikichip.org

HX DOS Extender can run some 16-bit and 32-bit Windows apps in a MS-DOS or even FreeDOS environment.

https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/HX

https://web.archive.org/web/20141003032346/http://www.japhet...

It's a pretty traditional "Hell, O World" program these days. ;)

Doesn't really address any of your questions, but may serve as a starting point: https://hackernoon.com/win3mu-part-1-why-im-writing-a-16-bit...

That's an interesting approach and might work, thanks!

I personally couldn't get it to run, which was quite a disappointment!

AFAIK you can run 16 bit Windows programs in Wine.

Yes I was about to give that advice, Wine handles 16 bit games pretty well

Thanks, I'll check it out for some ideas!

Doesn't dosbox do this?

Nope

You can run Windows 3.x in Dosbox, Dosbox can't run Windows 3.x compatible binaries directly though.

DOSbox will run Windows 3.x.

I’ve seen people running classic Windows games (pre-directX stuff) on a Raspberry Pi using this trick.

There is no copy protection for 16-bit Windows.

And 16-bit emulators exist.

I wasn't asking about an emulator or how to pirate Windows. I was asking if there are any 16 bit homebrew OSes (with Windows compatibility a plus). Emulation might be a starting point, though. Do you have a link to any?

https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

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