Is there any way for Vista 64 to play 32 bit/16 bit games?

[o.pwuaioc]

Yeah, 64 bit can handle way much more RAM and better than 32 bit can.

[BoringSupreez]

Yeah, 64 bit can handle way much more RAM and better than 32 bit can.

So for the ultimate PC gaming experience I need both a 64 and a 32 bit computer in the house.

[isiolia]

Eh, first we'd need games that actually use enough RAM for it to matter.

By the time it'd be a big deal, VMs may have improved to the point that the second machine would be largely moot. I think a lot of 16-bit Windows games likely had DOS versions too, which likely can be made to run with DosBox. The vast majority of games back then were in DOS, and most Win95 or later games are 32-bit.

[jeffro11]

I guess I should be glad I have 32 bit Vista on my PC, rather than 64 bit Vista. Is there even a benefit to 64 bit, or is it just a worthless feature?

64bit should be the standard. But it's people that hang onto old hardware and refuse to upgrade that make us all get stuck in the dark ages of software.

Theres more registers available to a 64bit processor specifically the x86-64 standard. In layman's terms this means the CPU can hold onto more data without having to go fetch more. This in turn significantly improves performance.

The downside to this is that the you're going to need more memory to do the same calculations, however... This point is moot considering the price of memory these days.

It's too much to go into. 64 bit is the standard as of the next version of windows. It should have been the standard years ago.

[DinnerX]

64-bit is technically faster. Although I would venture to say most people don't do anything that gets much benefit from the extra speed.

You wouldn't need another PC anyway. Just set up another partition on your hard drive and install a 32-bit OS to that if virtual machines are too slow for you. Virtual machines are way more convenient if they work though because you don't have to reboot to the other operating system when you want to play a game.

I forgot about this earlier, but I have one game that says it is a windows 3.1 game and it is actually a DOS application so I can run it in dosbox. So you might check dosbox even if the game doesn't say it has a dos version.

[jeffro11]

You can run Windows 95 in dosbox by the way.