1/n It has always bugged me that I can't run my 64-bit C# games on MS-DOS. Today I fixed that. A thread.
2/n Windows EXE files consist of two parts: a DOS program that prints "This program cannot be run in DOS mode", followed by a header that Windows understands.
3/n In a way, all EXEs are DOS programs - they're just not very useful DOS programs. One day I found this project (that deserves way more GitHub stars than it has): github.com/Baron-von-Ried…
4/n Dos64-stub is a small program that replaces the useless "Cannot run in DOS" with code that loads the Windows-specific portion of the EXE and teleports the process into 21. century. By teleporting I mean setting up paging and switching the CPU into 64-bit ("long") mode
5/n I started with my C# 8 kB self-contained Windows snake game:
6/n Of course DOS doesn't have Windows APIs, so I had to rewrite how the game talks to the world. This is Environment.TickCount on DOS: 
7/n Once we have the number of ticks, we can do Thread.Sleep:
8/n Or Console.Write:
9/n From there, it's easy: C# compiler -> CoreRT AOT compiler -> Linker. We tell the linker to use Dos64-stub instead of generating the useless "Cannot be run in DOS" program.
10/n Here's the pull request with all of it: github.com/MichalStrehovs…
