New Executable

New Executable

Filename extension	.exe, .dll, .fon, .drv
Type of format	Executable, dynamic-link library
Extended from	DOS MZ executable
Extended to	Portable Executable

The New Executable (abbreviated NE or NewEXE) is a

.

History

The first product to be released using the New Executable format was Windows 1.0 in 1985, followed by the 1986 multitasking MS-DOS 4.0, which was a separate branch of MS-DOS development, released between mainstream MS-DOS versions 3.2 and 3.3, and sometimes referred to as "European MS-DOS 4.0".

The

format.

Compatibility

While designed for 16-bit OSes, NE executables can be run on 32-bit Windows. Beginning with Windows Vista, icon resources inside New Executables are not extracted and shown even by the 32-bit shell.^[3] 64-bit versions of Windows completely lack native support for running NE executables, because 64-bit Windows cannot run 16-bit programs on the processor without the help of an emulator.

Due to the rare and fairly complex nature of these files, only a few

, and SLR Optloader or NeLite for OS/2. The NE format is also still used as (non-executable) container for .fon Microsoft Windows bitmapped fonts.

DOS stub

New (NE), linear (LX), and portable (PE) executables retain the DOS MZ format file header for backward compatibility with DOS. When run under DOS, a so-called DOS stub is executed which usually prints a "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" message and exits. This constitutes a minimal form of a so-called fat binary. Windows 1.0 executables, however, have their file header formatted in such a way that DOS refuses to run them with the "Program too big to fit in memory" error message; see Windows 1.0 Features.

See also

• COM file

References