64bit computers = death for the old games:(

It's so sad to see how the 32-bit machines are knocked into ground by the 64-bit beasts. Yeah, maybe they are better, faster and so on, but when everyone moves from 32 to 64 then the good old games (Wolfenstein, Settlers, Doom etc) will be vanished. And there's nothing we can do to save them. They will die the same death as C64 games, and the only memories that will remian after them will be viewed as YouTube movies. It's almost time to say goodbye, Mr Blazkowicz... You defeated so many Nazis, but eventually it's the technology that defeated You.

Hmm, interesting post. What about SDL, though? I think it's the old Dos games that will die. Although I still no people who won't upgrade their computers in a while, and many new computers still use 32 bit OS.

I think DOSBox has support for 64-bit stuff. But a 64-bit computer can run 32-bit stuff. The computer I am on right now is a 64-bit quad core and I can run DOSBox just fine w/o 64-bit support. Some very old stuff doesn't run but that is because I am running W7, at which point I either fire up DOSBox or run it in compatibility mode.

The thing is, unless the program relies heavily on ASM (I realize that c++ and most other compilers translate the code to ASM and then assemble that), the issue is moot in most cases. But with today's intelligent compilers, it is very easy to make things that are cross-compatible, and of course to compile 64-bit executables with little to no trouble. When you really break it down, the 64-bit CPU is almost identical to the 32-bit CPU. Except that the registers are now 64-bits wide and there are instructions to handle said register sizes. HOWEVER, all of the smaller denominations of registers are there too. Just like there is EAX, AX, AH and AL on a 32-bit CPU, there will now be RAX, EAX, AX, AH and AL. My laptop is an AMD64 and runs everything I want just fine.

Beyond that, we now have Wolf4SDL, DOSBox (as mentioned before) and other projects bringing old games into the future. I run ALL of my old games using DOSBox on both this desktop (an Intel x86-64) and my laptop (AMD64) and they play like dreams.