The Wintel Retro Landscape

I started this project before the massive boom in Claude-enabled decomps started rushing the scene, so this may now be mostly of historical rather than practical interest. I planned on comparing more applications but see little point now; I’m publishing more or less as it was last time I touched it. It should also be noted that when I wrote this, the Pi 5 was a lot more affordable! Windows On Intel dominated the late PC era, and there’s a wealth of software available for the platform, especially from the 90s and 2000s, right in the sweet spot when desktop games had matured but not bet become totally entangled in Steam and DRM. Microsoft has done an impressive job keeping legacy applications running on the platform. It’s a platform I hoped you could keep stable indefinitely, even if WINE was required. However, Wintel and desktop in general have been slowly falling out of favor. Apple, ever the trend setter, has switched away from Intel for its desktop machines. Microsoft has been…