Windows 11 still carries a chunk of the Windows 95 kernel to keep old apps alive
Why Windows 11 still ships with Windows 95's memory manager hidden inside it
A compatibility shim called EmulateHeap ships inside Windows 11 26H2, redirecting an old app's heap calls to a recompiled copy of the Windows 95 heap manager, so programs that read freed memory keep working. The tradition started when Microsoft patched Windows 95 itself just to run a buggy SimCity. Raymond Chen calls the fix simple yet completely crazy; the code only loads when enabled for a specific app.
There's a copy of a significant chunk of the Windows 95 kernel inside the Windows application compatibility framework.
- abanana
> The tradition goes back to SimCity, which only ran on Windows 95 because Microsoft wrote special code for it... Yes, Microsoft modified its OS just to cover up one game’s bug... The SimCity hack was a one-off
The stuff around SimCity in this article is poorly written. It seems the author has misunderstood it to have been a one-off special case. I looked back at Joel Spolsky's article, and he does make it quite clear that the SimCity example was just one of many: "it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95".
The article does later mention "Windows XP’s hidden database of app fixes" but doesn't appreciate that the concept really started with Windows 95, and in a big way, not "just to cover up one game’s bug".
- LASR
Whatever one might think of Windows and Microsoft, the idea that you can still run apps that are 30+ years old is incredible.
- RajT88
Alternate theory:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130226221212/http://windows95t...
- Dwedit
Why show a screenshot of a different game (SimCity 2000) when discussing SimCity?
- sedatk
It actually seems like Windows 11 shipping with Windows 3.1's memory manager that was kept in Windows 95 memory manager as a compatibility option.