Re: Masters of Orion II
MS has been including emulation wrappers in every version of Windows since NT 3.51... but let's just hate on them some more, mmm'kay? Developing and maintaining these intrinsically incompatible emulation wrappers is expensive, and at some point older OSes have to be dropped due to lack of profitable customer demand. Whole-OS virtualization is extremely primitive for everything outside of core OS runtimes. Anything at all to do with 3D rendering is either non-existent, or in early alpha stages in every virtualization technology out there (including the MS-owned Virtual PC). Providing a virtual machine to run DX8 and older games could be of value to Microsoft, given that there is still a market for such products that their home customers can benefit from, but why should they waste resources supporting 15+ year old DOS games in the core OS that almost 0% of the market cares about? There aren't any enterprise customers that need to be able to run them, and they have always been the major driver behind MS spending vast resources supporting "compatibility modes" and the like.
It's actually for the best that they canned all of the 16-bit runtime files in Vista; really old garbage needs to be phased out for the core OS to progress past the horrible state of software of the early 90s. For everyone involved, it's better to leave the extreme niche market of ancient software emulation to niche vendors (ala DOSBox). It will be a glorious day in the future when MS can finally delete all traces of GDI from Windows c. 2025.
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