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I have a legacy application (exe header = "MZ") which I usually run through VMWare workstation or the 32-Bit version of Windows. Now I got at a computer having a Core 2 Duo processor not supporting VT-x, and Windows 10x64, so VMWare won't run and the 16-Bit emulation built into WIndows x32 isn't available either.

I could try to swap the processor for a model which does support VT-x ... but before I go after that ... is there any other means which I can try to get this software running on Windows 10x64?

Thnx, Armin.

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Virtual machines existed well before PCs had CPUs with hardware virtualization support.

Older versions of VirtualBox had "ring 1" software virtualization that didn't require any special CPU support, and provided decent performance (e.g. I could easily run several WinXP/Win2003 VMs on my old Pentium 4 machine).

This feature was removed in VirtualBox 6.1.0 – only two years ago; older versions can be found easily and are compatible with Windows 10 hosts.

Similarly, the free Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 used software virtualization, but it might not run on Windows 10 hosts anymore (last time I used it on Windows XP).

(And I believe older versions of VMware Workstation also used to support this mode, but I'm not sure which versions exactly, nor how you'd obtain them legally.)

Option two is QEMU or Bochs, which provide entirely software-based emulation. This is quite a bit slower, but as you're using a 16-bit app, you could use an older Windows version as the VM guest (e.g. Windows 98).

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