Why do some programs (talking of Windows) give the "this

>>60230679
>Btw I am making a game that works all the way from Win95 to modern Windows OS.

*I'm planning to make

Oops... looks like I triggered the autosage.

Well damn

>this program must be run on 8bit/16bit/32bit/whateverbit system bla bla
these occur in only a few situations, namely;
- trying to run a windows program in DOS ("this program requires microsoft windows")
- trying to run a DOS or 16bit windows program on 64bit windows (64bit windows drops NTVDM, required for DOS/16bit windows software)
- trying to run 64bit software on 32bit/16bit windows (forget the error specifically, but it won't run)

if you want to make a game work on windows 95 and up, you'll want to target 95, and test on everything else you want to support to ensure compatibility
this basically means limiting yourself to functionality and libraries that function on windows 95 (and up)
it will need to be 32bit as well (windows 95 is 32bit, and every later version of windows still supports 32bit software)

>>60231040
oh, another solution is to target a system which has emulators for all the platforms you wish to support
for example, you could make a game for DOS, and ship it with DOSBOX for platforms that don't natively support DOS games
or even an interpreted game engine like SCUMM (the emulator SCUMMVM has ports for every platform under the sun)

>>60231040
ps. targeting systems as old as 95 will impose other limits as well, for them to make sense
for example, it makes no sense for a game targeting windows 95 to require over 500M ram, as windows 95 does not handle over 500M ram itself, so it will never actually run in windows 95, even though it technically should
not to mention, any machine where windows 95 makes sense to run on, will be very low end by todays standards, making a game that only runs well on say, a core2duo, wouldn't run on any normal windows 95 box