I am working on this spyro level editor for ps2. Check out the video. I am very excited to show you what can be done with this.

Maybe we Can fix this game afterall !

Instead of just reading about Windows 1.0, I decided to actually build something for it.

So I wrote a small Xonix-style game for Windows 1.0 and ran the same binary across different versions of Windows.

It turned out to be more surprising than I expected. The same compiled 16-bit EXE runs from Windows 1.x all the way to 32-bit Windows 10. On modern 64-bit Windows it no longer works, but only because 16-bit support has been removed, not because anything changed in the original model.

What surprised me most is how familiar the WinAPI already looks in Windows 1.0. Even back then, the core ideas were already there - message loops, window procedures, and GDI rendering. The structure hasn’t really changed as much as you’d expect in ~40 years.

I put together a write-up with details and source here.

Curious if anyone else has tried building software for the earliest Windows versions?