This provides a huge improvement in speed over the alternative, and enables the 16-bit app to behave as if it were a native application. This means that even though a 16-bit app is running, things like windowing, menus, text rendering, and disk IO in the app are being handled by the actual 32-bit operating system. When called, most of the functions in these stubs "thunk" out to the real operating system. WOW loads a special environment in the VDM (hidden from the user) with 16-bit stubs instead of the 3.1 kernel and other system 16-bit DLLS. In NT the Win16 VDM is not just a "dos box" running Win 3.1.
#Calmira nt shell Pc
This is what is being considered the "real" way to do it as opposed to using an x86 PC emulator such as Bochs or Qemu and running the Microsoft Windows 3.1 product inside that (what would be the point of doing it that way?). When you run a win16 app it calls NTVDM.exe.Ĭorrect, in NT on x86 both DOS and Win16 use VDMs. once you terminate the process wowexec.exe will also close. then right click on ntvdm.exe and stop the process (not process tree). You will see a NTVDM.exe process start, then wowexec.exe start, and it will be indented in the list. If you want to see this effect, open up taskmanager and go to the processes tab, then go to Start > Run and type in wowexec.exe (unfortunately when you close the app it does not close the ntvdm.exe or the wowexec.exe processes)
When you do this if you look at taskmanager you see that wowexec.exe is run under the ntvdm.exe process and stops when you stop the ntvdm.exe process. If you take the MS MCSE courses they call this the windows on windows subsystem (ie this is the win16 subsystem).
When you run a win16 app it calls NTVDM.exe (stands for NT Virtual DOS Machine) which is the DOS subsystem and then it runs wowexec.exe. Yes, and even if you have it, it would be a lot slower to run win3x apps under dosbox instead in 'real' win3x mode like in windows NT/2K/XP. That would defeat the point of using ReactOS which is to get rid of Microsoft products. I would not expect those to work under ReactOS either.Īlso, I would not find it acceptable to run Microsoft Windows 3.1 in a DOS box, as that would mean I would have to legally purchase a copy of MS-Windows 3.1 to run. 386 VxDs to be installed or try to talk to the hardware do not work under Windows NT/2000/XP. Only oddball applications such as disk utilities or debuggers that expect. Since Windows NT can run this program, I would expect the same functionality from ReactOS since ReactOS claims to be a Windows NT clone. It does not talk to hardware or do anything funky. It runs under Windows 3.X, 9x/ME, NT, 2000, XP, and even Wine. Well-behaved Windows 3.1 apps do not access the hardware directly or talk to DOS.įor example I have a very nice 16-bit greeting card application called "instant artist" that was written for Windows 3.0. The NTkernel does not allown to call direcly to the NT kernel. It is no plan for any type of 16bits support.įor win3.x apps are calling also to the dos api, windows api and directly to the hardware.