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 16bit, while modern computers are now 64bit. 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 32bit baseline, and let me resolve API issues such as changed to hPrevInstance, and the removal of certain nonEx 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 64bit 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 nonx86 world.

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