"Surely such an ancient piece of code [..] wouldn't launch?"
I had that kind of surprise with Chuck Yeager's Air Combat.
It's an old DOS game from, IIRC, a bit before Microsoft Flight Simulator, and it was a lot of fun to play because you could configure what you going up against to a rather impressive degree (for the time, especially).
I first played it on my trusty 8086, and it ran fine.
Years later, I was fiddling around on my brand-new 486DX66 and suddenly, I wondered how CYAC would react. Now, I have tried quite a few DOS games since the 286 was done and buried, and most of them end practically as soon as you start the game because they are generally tied to the CPU frequency.
Not CYAC. I don't know how they programmed that thing, but it ran just fine on my 486. I'm sure it would also run fine on a Pentium. Don't know about today's multi-core CPUs though.
Maybe I'll have to try that . . .
Biting the hand that feeds IT
