Well. Microsoft is also dropping 32 bit support for Windows 10 in 2025. I guess that makes Proton some weird hackish abstraction layer over the continuously updated underlying linux libs.
Would be funny if Proton gets pulled into Windows releases to maintain support for legacy games as Microsoft shortens the length of their support.
Ah yeah, you're right. WOW64 appears to not be going anywhere anytime soon.
Although. I gotta say, I don't use windows much, but some folks I kind of helped out on the side were upgrading to Windows 8 and were completely unable to launch their 32 bit XP accounting software binary with every emulation flag I tried. (could just have been my inexperience on this, but wasn't finding anything in the support guides).
Oddly enough, it ran fine in Wine in virtualbox in a small ubuntu instance, so they ended up just using that in seamless mode.
So, at least from past experience that legacy compat is not 100% and I'm guessing games might be even more finicky than accounting software.
They are however (by dropping the 32bit versions of Windows) dropping 16bit support. Which still exists in 32bit Windows 10 along with NTVDM (AKA DOS emulation). So I guess it's the end of the line for MSDOS?
