MusicallyInspired, on 11 August 2019 - 06:24 AM, said:
We have DOSBox for DOS applications, why isn't there anything for Win3.x/Win95-era 16-bit programs by now? Will WINE do it under Linux? Didn't I hear of a Windows port for WINE specifically for this purpose? Is there any news about that? Maybe I'm wrong.
A while ago I managed to run
some Windows interactive CD menus from game mag coverdisks I found at archive.org with vanilla Wine in Linux. Some stuff didn't work though, no idea why, and I wasn't motivated to dig further. From what I know, Wine was originally developed specifically for Win16 applications but I generally had less luck running those in modern Wine versions that 32/64 bit stuff. Like, none of the Win16 Macromedia Director self-running demos (Blizzard and some other game publishers used them in the mid-90s) ever worked for me in Wine.
DOSBox is different in at least one aspect: it emulates the entire hardware setup of a DOS machine, thus being self-sufficient and platform-independent. Wine on the other hand is supposed to "translate" Windows applications into something that a Linux machine can "understand" and run. As far as I understand it, if you wanted to have a Windows version of Wine or an equivalent too, you'd need to change it so that it would "translate" applications into a language understandable by a modern Windows system. I have no idea how much work that would involve, and at any rate it's less prioritised because there's at least some legacy compatibility options in modern Windows versions. The BoxedWine thing linked to above on the other hand, includes the Linux kernel in a virtual environment for it to work.