Why can i play a 16 bit pc game on windows vista 64 bit

Microsoft pretty much scrapped the use of 16 bit applications because it's old news. But you could try a program called DosBox to run 16 bit programs. Don't know if it will run on Vista x64 as I have never touched it.

16-bit support was dropped with Vista. DosBox is an alternative, but only if the game is native DOS.

The lack of 16-bit support is one reason why Vista/7 have and will do so badly in the business market; I know that at the place I work (a major software company), we still operate between our sites on a 16-bit telnet connection, which won't work on Vista/7. Hence, we use XP/2000.

I built a win 98 pc built out of scrap and hand me downs for old games like that. Ive got a 750 mhz pentium 3, a geforce 4ti and 256mb of ram, it cost me a whole £7.50 total   which was spent on the graphics card - which was still brand new and sealed  . This system is more than adequate to play many games from the win 95/98 era that XP wouldnt run  . Technology this old is often found cluttering a spare room etc. Might be worth asking around friends and family looking for old PC's or parts, or trying a local freecycle type group.

I run my main gaming rig on vista 64, the patch's provided by pirates get over most hurdles of XP era games that dont work on vista, and for pre XP stuff the win 98 rig gets used.

Why not just make a windows 98 partiton?

Doesn't Windows 7 RC1 comes with the 'Windows Virtual Mode' (I can't remember the exact name of the feature) which allows you to run an older version of Windows inside Windows 7 at the same time? This could be your solution.

Even if it does come with a virtual machine, it depends on the level of emulated hardware as to how well it will work. Ive used virtual machines before but normally the hardware emulation is a very basic display driver, no good for even windows 98 gaming.

The biggest problem with a win 98 partition is that drivers for win98 are hard to come by for modern components, and theres no guarantee that you can get the xp drivers to work properly under win 98.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it's only 64bit windows that won't run 16bit programs. I swear we have some at work that run fine on Vista32

if its a dos game try dosbox+D.O.G ( front end for dosbox)
if its an adventure game like monkey island try scummvm

There is loads of windows 95/98 era games that never ran under xp. Applications arent such a problem, but games are a different kettle of fish. I cursed XP a lot when it first came out for not running some of my favourite games.

Thats related to the fact a lot of .dll's that were written in 16-bits were upgraded to be 32-bit compliant, not the dropping of support for 16-bits. A also suspect many of the kernal changes broke a lot of those games. (to be fair, a lot of them were patched).

I also get the point about Win98 drivers; guess thats why I use ME as my legacy OS (heavily partitioned and protected)

I never really got along with ME, only ever had it on a couple of systems at work and it always seemed unstable, windows 2000 seemed better, so I never even gave ME a chance at home. I dont think I have disks or a license key for ME hanging around. That said Im completely happy with the seperate ig solution it does exactly what I want it to do.

Out of curiosity how well does modern hardware perform on the older games? obviously the seperate rig I have goes well with any game from the era as its far more advanced than most system specs, but I know I found situations already on that rig where later cards didnt perform as well in the older games. hence I went for the geforce 4ti - which despite being dated performed better than directx 8/9 cards for the older (dx5-7) games under windows 98.

Newer stuff helps, although in some cases with halarious results. For example, in Kings Quest VII, there is a spot in chapter 5 where you have to carry a lit firecracker 3 screens and shove it through a keyhole to open the door. Problem is, they forgot to put in a speed limiter on the fuse...you need to move step by step, so when you die (and you will  ), you will revive one step closer. Then you need to be quick to get the thing in the keyhole...

So yeah, some problems like that exists. Nothing major i've seen so far, except the usually ME craziness.

I couldn't get "No one lives forever" to install on vista 64 so installed it on my XP partition and dragged the entire folder over to vista and it runs fine did the same with AvP2 aswell.  

^^ Probably because the installer was the old 16-bit windows installer, but the program itself was 32-bits. Note, if the game saves any data to the system registry, you will likely run into problems at some point.

Some games are better than others for registry entries. I was shocked by just how little some mmorpg's put in the registry and how easy it was to copy over to another pc and then just add the one or two keys yourself rather than going through a full install process. Comes in usefull sometimes when reinstalling a system saving having to patch up etc.

Yeah, I wish more games would give a repair option that just redoes the registry entries; would make OS installs (assuming games on seperate drive) much easier...

tru using vista 32bit

also try reinstaling the drivers

XP Mode.

'Nuff said.

"Why can i play a 16 bit pc game on windows vista 64 bit"

64/4 = 16 so why can you?

Because it's a different architecture. It's not backwards compatible and the drivers function differently.

Just because it's a multiple of 16 doesn't mean anything.

No GPU hardware acceleration, so that doesn't solve the problem for anything that needs any significant GPU processing power.

I realized that after I already posted, but I was thinking straight 16-bit apps. Otherwise, for games, nope. It won't help either.

Windows 7 Ultimate, Premium 32/64 Bit have XP Mode. First off you meed a CPU that supports Virtual Mode (Only Newer CPU's in last 6 months). Second it does not support games, to much power required so Microsoft decided no games. Can read this at Mirosoft site. So everyone forget XP Mode for gaming, not gonna work. Have already tested myself and it doesn't work. Only good for business apps not compatible with Windows 7. 16 Bit will not work in 32/64 Bit OS due to coding, DOSBOX only way to go. To run most 16 Bit games in WinXP needed to setup a "DOS" environment to play (basically DOSBOX). So there you go.

This is where VMWare Player or VirtualBox comes into play because it DOES do 3d acceleration, albeit since it is a virtual machine, it won't run as fast as a true machine. But, for older games, it might work out better.