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by tonyarkles 332 days ago
Yeah, that’s the downside to swapping architectures. x86 goes to great pains to be backward-compatible at the instruction level, and then MS puts a lot of effort into keeping Windows backwards compatible.

A couple years back on Windows 10 I successfully installed and used a PCB layout tool from 1998. I was shocked at how smooth it went. I think it needed to run as administrator but otherwise zero issues.
1 comments
pjmlp 332 days ago
Windows NT has run on multiple architectures since day one with x86/PowerPC/Alpha/MIPS flavours, however x86/AMD64 has won over them.

Trying to add ARM desktop to the mix hasn't indeed been easy, because of backwards compatibility efforts, most folks don't care about Windows ARM laptops.

Pocket PC/Windows CE also had ARM/MIPS variants.

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jeroenhd 332 days ago
From what I can tell, it may have taken MS a while, but it seems like on the Windows side of things, amd64 emulation seems to work pretty flawlessly. There are still issues (i.e. Qualcomm's drivers not being as good as Nvidia's/Intel's/AMD's) but at least on the Windows side of the equation everything seems to work now.

Because MS doesn't require special emulation hardware like Rosetta2 does, I expect amd64 emulation on Windows to last a lot longer than it will on macOS, too.

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pjmlp 332 days ago
> ...but at least on the Windows side of the equation everything seems to work now.

Depends on how much you care about Khronos APIs for example.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/announcing-the-opencl...

No other updates since 2020.

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tonyarkles 331 days ago
> Windows NT has run on multiple architectures since day one with x86/PowerPC/Alpha/MIPS flavours, however x86/AMD64 has won over them.

True in theory, but in practice you're not going to take a Windows NT PPC .exe and run it anywhere today. Apple's done a decent job with Rosetta and Rosetta 2 doing CPU emulation when doing the transitions but I don't think they've ever targeted the same "You can run Windows 95 x86 .exes on Windows 11 x86-64" backwards-compatibility goal.

My experience with OSX and iOS backwards compatibility is similar to the post author's: things might break once in a while on a long timeframe but it's usually pretty easy to rebuild for a newer version. This works fine so long as the company that owns the source code actually still exists and is willing to build a new version.

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