I’ve recently gone through my cyclic experience of having my system die and replacing it with a newer one, with up to date OS. New one is dual-core running Win 7 64-bit.
Unfortunately XP was apparently the last version to support 16-bit apps, so I’ve lost the use of some antiques like dBase. Anyone know if there’s some kind of adaptor/emulator/whatever that’ll permit these to run under Win 7? Or should I lump them in with nearly all my old DOS stuff and consider them ancient history? Thanks.
http://www.windowsreference.com/free-utilities/dosbox-free-opensource-dos-x86-emulator-for-windows-linux/ is this what you are after ?
Thanks, essexboy. I’d played with dosbox some years ago to get some old DOS games running (biggest problem was getting the frame rate adjusted properly for a modern system), but never thought of it in terms of Win apps for older Win versions.
My biggest gripe with it is that despite being intended for Windows, it badly needs a reasonable GUI to help with the setup process, mounting drives and moving the appropriate apps. Fortunately my son’s quite familiar with it, and can do that part far easier than I could.
Thanks again, and best,
Mike
You might have better luck in Windows 8. 
It’s not about WinXP vs. Win7 - the key point is that you have a 64bit OS. You cannot run 16bit application on WinXP x64, but you can still run them on Win7 32bit (and probably Win8 32bit as well). Those 64bit operating systems already have one additional subsystem to deal with (32bit programs), so it would most likely be quite a hassle to support another one.
It’s not very convenient, but you can always install a virtual machine (VirtualBochs, VMware, …) on your Win7 64bit, install the old 32bit WinXP in there and run your old programs that way…
Or, higher editions of Win7 have this “XP mode thing” (license to download VirtualPC plus a preinstalled WinXP image for free) - which is basically the same.