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By the 90s, PCs with [[POS_(Pong_Consoles)_CPUs_and_Other_Chips#x86_CPUs|Intel CPUs]] started to break away from the mold of their 16-bit incarnations. It began with Intel taking the helm of the PC platform with the ATX specification, which departed from the PC AT and related models in a number of ways. The rise of PCs also brought with it the bundling of the Windows 9x family of operating systems, which were hybrid 16/32-bit operating systems consisting of Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME; Windows 2000 was based on Windows NT.
Playing games released for these platforms on a modern system can be quite easy as programs can be run on latest Windows without sacrifices due to backwards compability.<ref>https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/make-older-apps-or-programs-compatible-with-windows-783d6dd7-b439-bdb0-0490-54eea0f45938</ref> However this may change in the near future due to dropping 16 and 32-bit support from processors.<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FpXimj1oA René Rebe: Intel finally to remove 16-bit REAL MODE and some 32b RINGS]</ref><ref>[[Wikipedia:X86#From_16-bit_and_32-bit_to_64-bit_architecture|In 2023, Intel proposed a major change to the architecture referred to as x86-S (with S standing for "simplification"), which aims to remove support for legacy execution modes and instructions]]</ref>
If you are trying to get Win9x software working on a modern system, you should only be using this page as a last resort and would be better suited to read the [https://www.pcgamingwiki.com PC Gaming Wiki], which likely already has information on the game you want. If you don't have the operating system you want, you can download it from [https://winworldpc.com/library/operating-systems WinWorldPC].
