11,831
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
The PC architecture originates from the 1981 IBM PC 5150. Due to being designed with off-the-shelf hardware, clone manufacturers could produce compatible hardware and was only limited by the copyright on the PC's BIOS. To circumvent this, competitors such as Compaq created their own compatible BIOSes using clean-room reverse engineering.[https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Legal_Status_of_Emulation#Avoiding]
While the PC is technically capable of running many different operating systems, most of the emulators on this page are intended for running DOS software or some kind of DOS-based Windows (versions preceding Windows 2000 and XP), if you wish to run software intended for a NT-based version of Windows it is suggested to use a [[compatibility layer]] or [[hypervisor]] instead, see also [[Windows_95Windows 95/98/ME_emulatorsME emulators]] and [[Windows_2000Windows 2000/XP/Vista_emulatorsVista emulators]] pages.
Most emulators on this page requires an operating system to run, exceptions to this are DosBox and DREAMM, with the former having its own DOS implementation and the latter implementing both DOS and Win32 APIs. If you want to run Windows software in DosBox you still need a Windows install.
