What Does It Take To Port 16-Bit Windows 1.0 Applications Into Native Windows 11 Programs?

Windows has been around for 36 years now, and it's changed a lot since it's early days. However, one question I had to wonder is: what does it take to port a legacy Windows 1.0 application to the modern day. After all, computers in 1985 were 16-bit, while modern computers are now 64-bit. For those of us who lived through the 90s, you'll remember that upgrading to then new Windows 95, and NT 4 were very much a big deal.

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For the sake of my curiosity, I decided to find out. Starting with the example applications from the Windows 1.0 SDK, i started by porting them forward to Windows 3.1 and modifying them to compile under Microsoft Visual C++ 1.52. After ensuring I had working project files, I then ported then to Visual C++ 6 under Windows NT 4. This provided a 32-bit baseline, and let me resolve API issues such as changed to hPrevInstance, and the removal of certain non-Ex variants of functions from 16 to 32 bits.

This then extended to porting to Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005, where I did an initial x64 port, and tried to create an Itanium based ported, but failed, due to Microsoft's annoying policies of gating off developer tools behind an absurd paywall.

After gnashing my heath, we hopped ahead to Windows 11, and Visual Studio 11, where, after importing the project files, we had everything running just fine on 64-bit platforms. This of course encouraged chat to make me take it further. First I ended getting the applications running on WINE, then we hopped into ReactOS, OS/2, and well, we transcended the world of x86 programming entirely, and ended up on NT4 on MIPS, which involved using a special edition of Visual C++ 4 to compile the binaries for the never realized non-x86 world.

Afterwords, we wrapped itup, and I decided to re-edit this stream into a full fledged video, with the third NCommander in Realtime event.
#ncommander #retrocomputing #window1 #16bit