A lot of people are under the impression that MS-DOS applications are no longer supported under Windows 8. The 32bit version of Windows 8 does support 16 bit DOS apps.
I've recently been looking at updating a very old but useful FoxPro MS DOS App which we had been using on a creaky old Windows XP machine. Being a lot of effort to convert to a more modern framework I decided to investigate the possibility of using it on Windows 8. From past experience, I knew it would not work on the 64 bit version of Windows 7 so I assmumed the same was true of Windows 8.
To my surprise, it just worked on the 32 bit version of Windows 8 Professional! The only problem was that the keyboard layout was US not UK. Why can't Microsoft set the keyboard layout correctly given that it was a UK version of Windows 8 I installed, not an international version I don't know. To fix the keyboard layout problem all I neede to do was to edit the autoexec.nt and config.nt files (found in c:\windows\system32) just like in the old DOS days, by adding the lines detailed below.
CONFIG.NT
COUNTRY=044,850,C:\Windows\System32\COUNTRY.SYS
AUTOEXEC.NT
C:\Windows\System32\KB16 UK,850,C:\Windows\System32\KEYBOARD.SYS
Update 25-June-2020:
16 bit applications still work in Windows 10 32 bit pro.
