Installing a 16-bit Windows 95 game on 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium

Solution 1:

A 64-bit operating system won't be able to run a 16-bit program unless you run the program through an emulator or a virtual machine. For more info, see these Super User posts:

• Why 64 bit OS can't run a 16-bit application?
• How do I get 16-bit programs to work on a 64-bit Windows?

This question on Arqade: How to get old 16-bit Windows games to work on 64-bit Windows?, is similar to yours, but the solutions in the answers won't help since you can't run Windows XP mode in Windows 7 Home Basic / Premium.

A solution, from this post in Super User:

Use an emulator like DOSBox for 16-bit DOS games...

Since NBA Live 98 doesn't seem to be a DOS game, you might want to try the emulator, Win3mu.

Win3mu is a Windows 3.0 emulator. It includes an 8086 CPU emulation that loads 16-bit Windows executables and maps API calls onto the modern 32 or 64-bit Windows API.

The website for Win3mu only offers a source code download. An installable build for Win3mu can be downloaded from https://github.com/Mwyann/win3mu/releases.

Another alternative is to use a Virtual Machine (VM). A VM will allow you to run a 32-bit OS within 64-bit Windows 7. A VM software you might want to try is VirtualBox, which you can use to run Windows 7 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, or an even older Windows OS within Windows 7 Home Basic / Premium.

Other alternatives to VirtualBox (thanks to pixel for mentioning) are: VMWare Player and Windows Virtual PC (Windows 7 Home Basic / Premium are also supported host operating systems).