Win 95 vs. NT: Can I run my old Windows 3.1 data acquisition application under Windows 95 or Windows

Win 95 vs. NT: Can I run my old Windows 3.1 data acquisition application under Windows 95 or Windows

Your 16-bit Windows 3.1 data acquisition application will run properly under Windows 95 but not under Windows NT, because Windows NT does not allow direct hardware port I/O calls. To run under Windows NT, an application requires a kernel mode device driver; your application would have to be modified to communicate with that device driver. When modifying a 16-bit application under Windows 95 or NT using a 32-bit compiler-such as Visual C, Visual C++ or Visual BASIC 5.0 - you will need new drivers with 32-bit DLLs, because 32-bit compilers are not backward compatible with 16-bit code and cannot make calls to 16-bit DLLs.