Believe it or not, a lot of servers are running outdated 32 bit versions to maintain compatibility with legacy 16bit apps, for which if there is no source code cannot be easily ported to 32/64 bit.Įven some purely 32 bit programs I've come across are wrapped in a 16 bit installer, rendering them needlessly useless on contemporary systems! I personally have largely jumped the Windows ship, but keep a copy of Windows 10 to play some games I bought for Windows. There was an article in The Register recently aimed at sysadmins (I'm having trouble finding it but will post it if I do) using Windows on whether they should make the jump to a 64 bit version of Windows.

The only solution would be to run in a 32 bit OS (which maintains full compatibility with the 16bit instruction set as the CPU operates in 32 bit mode) or to emulate a 16bit or 32 bit Intel architecture processor.

Hence, no DOS or Windows 3.x programs will run and some earlier 32bit Windows programs will also not work as they call some 16 bit libraries, even if the app itself is 32 bit. If a 64 bit operating system is installed, the CPU operates in 64bit mode and support for certain 16bit instructions is deprecated. Put simply, these processors operate in one of two modes, depending on the operating system. The reason 64 bit has issues with old games is to do, as far as I know with the amd64 (x86_64) processor architecture.

Command and conquer 64 bit