First of all I'm sorry for my ignorance, I really don't know much about computers.

My question is about a 16 bit game which works pretty good on old 32 bit Windows Operating Systems, but as you can expect do not work on 64 bit ones.

I have downloaded a Linux distro and it says it is x86_64 in its name but it seemed weird as I don't know much about computers I have some questions.

What is x86_64? Is it 32 bit or 64 bit? My computer is capable of using 64 bit OS's but I usually prefer 32 bit to be able to play old games, especially those 16 bit ones. Will this x86_64 run the 16 bit games? I'd like to make sure before installing so I wanted to ask beforehand.

I'm not a native English speaker, I hope I could explain the question.

Thank you.

32-bit basically means instead of 64 bits of information at a time, it's only 32 bits of information that is processed - in simple terms. There's a lot more to it than that, but I don't want to confuse you anymore than what you probably are.

Here's the Wikipedia page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit_computing

You can run 16-bit and 32-bit software on a 64-bit processor, but NOT the other way around.

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Hey! Thanks for your help.

Welcome to linuxquestions.

In addition DOS/Windows games or programs do not natively run with linux. Depending on the game it may run using wine or dosbox.

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If the game is old ebough to be 16 bit then it may not "just work" even with 32 bit compatibility installed.
My recomendation would be to look into something like qemu and have a "virtual machine" ruinning 16 bit things.

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Hello!

Thanks for the information.

Thank you!

If it's a DOS game you can try dosemu, which is 16-bit.

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Thank you!