this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Memes

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Everything I need is still in in the old settings windows that haven't changed in 23 years (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I don't know why I even bother opening the settings app

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (2 children)

That fact does seem really fun and interesting. Why barbie? Got any links so I can read up on it?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I googled a bit, and perhaps this statement comes from this old Reddit thread here in the first comments.

There it's mainly used as a joke to describe how Windows is just very backwards compatible in general. The story might have stuck and warped a bit as like it really had a reference to that Barbie game.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well, I did find this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I couldn't find a reference to Barbie in your link, or am I missing something?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

No, I’m just saying that compatibility databases do seem to exist, and the existence of “custom” ones implies that there is a built-in one. It wouldn’t be surprising to find out that Barbie and about a million other widespread legacy executables are in there.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I know there was an old hack for simcity but I've never heard about barbie. I've checked and the claim seems to come from (now removed) @pwnallthethings twitter account. What he refers to there is that Windows indeed maintains a compatibility database, which, unlike the normal compatibility menu, allows more compatibility tweaks and works entirely automatically. On my fresh win11 install, the compatibility administrator tool lists a few hundred compatibility shims and thousands of apps listed, with "Barbie Adventure Riding Club" indeed being one of them