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this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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That fact does seem really fun and interesting. Why barbie? Got any links so I can read up on it?
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.
Well, I did find this.
I couldn't find a reference to Barbie in your link, or am I missing something?
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.
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
Great find :)
I see PwnAllTheThings is on Mastodon:
PwnAllTheThings: Twitter was special. But it's time to leave