ntvdmx64 VS Windows UI Library

The link in the post to NTVDMx64 at Columbia seems to be broken, but the associated GitHub project appears to be at https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64

  "What is it?

ntvdmx64 might also be an option.

People who absolutely need to run 16-bit DOS apps on x64 Windows can use NTVDMx64: https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64

If it's Windows, you can probably just use an external CD drive or look for an ISO copy online. For the most part, old Windows software still works with modern Windows (REALLY old software will be 16-bit and will need NTVDMx64 to work on 64-bit). Though I'm not sure about the driver itself. If it's a generic protocol, it might just be plug-and-play

I've seen NTVDMx64 mentioned in the BBS community, as it's supposed to install a 16-bit NTVDM on 64-bit editions of Windows. I've been trying to get this installed on my main desktop PC at home (running Windows 11 64-bit), but I always run into some errors trying to install it, and it doesn't seem to install completely (I am unable to run 16-bit DOS programs).

Looks like the NTVDMX64 link was taken down from the columbia.edu website and is now just at https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64

Well... Windows is always the best option because of its backwards compatibility. Even with some small apps (like NTVDMx64, or similar) you can even make Win10/Win11 run software made to run in 16-bit (or, Windows 3.1 or Win95). I've had to do that for some edutainment software for my son.

If you really want DOS apps on 64-bit there's https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64 or use a flavour of DOSBox.

I wish that was true, but even the new stuff, like their new frameworks, performs poorly while their older frameworks perform really well. That's brand new code, with no legacy codebase to care for.

The reason why I don't recommend Winui is the million bugs it has. See the github issues page. All Microsoft ui stuff sucks currently. But if you use WPF why not FluentWPF

Development for WinAppSdk and WinUI 3 is also very slow and Microsoft seems to not want to push it and invest more developers into it for some reason. They try to improve the framework, is just it's a small team. For example it was a headacke to apply the Mica backgrop and required unmanaged code, they made it simpler and reduced it to a line of code but it took months. I have 2 out of 7 issues fixed on WinAppSdk repository and 0 out of 8 issues fixed in the WinUI 3 repository (some of the older than a year). This are just my issues, there are many other opened by other developers. So yeah, it wasn't fun at all. PoweshellSDK had an issue with the Import-Module command and it wasn't fixed for more than a year and probably won't be ever fixed, but I'm glad I found a workaround, even more clean and more safe, otherwise I couldn't have added the posibility to uninstall and change Store apps.

Compared to UWP or WPF, WinUI 3 is somewhere between 100-200% slower and consumes 7-20 times as much RAM as the old frameworks (for certain operations).