Directly Running 16 bit Windows program on 64 bit Windows without Virtual Machines or DOSBOX

Well, I technically, there is still a virtual machine because that is what "VM" stands for. But it is not the popular virtual machines as we know that runs an isolated OS within an OS (e.g. VMWare, VirtualBox). Everyone already knows you can run anything on those stuff.

So here is what you get when you run a Win16 program on Win64:

 
In the awesome country of everything awesome (Japan), comes yet another awesome piece of technology.

WOWOW/OTDVM

So far, anthing I can find about running nostalgic 16 bit Windows on modern 64 bit Windows will explain how this is impossible. But maybe I've been searching wrong. Maybe I should have been searching in Japansese.
I knew that wine does a good job of runing Win 16. I even occasionally contemplate that Linux with Wine is a better alternative than the current auto-breakingWindows loaded with spying bloatware.

FYI: Wine can run 16bit Windows programs even in 64bit Linux

Searching how Wine runs Win 16, I learned about a thing called winedvm.exe. (And at the moment, I couldn't find where I read that fact from winehq.org and all I can see are how winedvm.exe crashes. I'm lucky to have found such an obscure tidbit of knowledge, but it doesn't help that this blog is even more obscure.)

And at the moment of writing this, I just had to check out NTDVM, what winedvm is simualting at Windows, and guess what, another interesting piece of emulation heaven.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nxvdm/
https://github.com/cshaxu/nxvm
This might be geared towards DOS 16bit programs though (I only looked at the screenshots and assumed that if Win16 is also possible, then it must be too cool not to showcase).

At the moment, OTDVM is still underdevelopment, and it might be crashing your beloved 16bit program instead of running it. But that is still far humane than how Win64 flat out rejecting its Win16 software grand parents. I tried loading the back-then-popular Calmira shell and I got the spash screen and some error messages.

I also tried with some of my past Visual Basic programs, and they loaded and OTDM seems to also have loaded the necessary vbrun300.dll which is on the same folder as the program. Textboxes do not display proper fonts yet and the menu doesn't look properly renderd.

As can be seen, the program is running on top of Windows 7 64 bit. (although this screenshot really doesn't prove that the program is 16 bit or that I did not photoshop all of it).

Conclusion:
Seeing that the project is active, and seeing that Wine can actually manage to load Win16 stuff and that this is from the awesome land of Japan, I think that this project has potential. It would be nice though if more people might accelearte this project. Unfortunately, programming windows API internals is beyond me. Seeing that this is based on Wine (which is a Linux program), it might also be intersting to investigate how Cygwin handles Linux programs under Windows.

And now I have made 2 blog posts for the year 2018, so I already exceeded my quota. If nothing else gets posted within the year, it doesn't necessarily mean that I have crossed the river styx.