From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg

On 2018-10-16, Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 15 Oct 2018 23:44:20 -0700 (PDT), devin.moravec@gmail.com
wrote:

On Monday, July 29, 1996 at 2:00:00 AM UTC-5, Tabb wrote:

Igor Obraztsov wrote:

I know, I might be the last person in the world to do it, but today I finally
got on Blizzard's website and looked thru Diablo info/screenshots.
Among the requirements, I saw a line that filled me with dread - Windows95.
I've had dealings with win95 before, and that's enough for me. I don't want
to have anything to do with that bloated creation of pure evil, contaminating
our poor computers. Is Diablo going to be a Win95-only game???

SNIP

Yep...

Lol. Funny going back to see chats in the past. I don't know what the issue all of you
people were having. As a 5-year-old at the time, I did not have any issues. I would
build P90 machines from parts of broken machines my dad would bring home from
work and hook them up to play Diablo, Starcraft, Doom, Quake, Warcraft II, etc.
with very little problems. If there were, I learned how to fix them fairly easily.

Win95 was obviously not perfect and had issues, but I think more of this talk has to
do with hearsay and bullsh$t, than real issues.

There were a number of legitimate concerns and criticisms about
Windows95, especially in its early years and especially for gamers.
Here are a few I remember off the top of my head.

Firstly, there were significant performance issues. Machines at the
time usually only had 8 or 16MB of RAM, and Windows95 used a
significant chunk of that just for itself. CPUs were likewise limited
(I think I was still running a 486/33 when Windows95 was released).
For all its other problems, DOS allowed games an exclusive lock on all
the hardware and could maximize performance. The overhead of Windows95
meant a Win95-game running on the same hardware as the DOS version was
always slower. DirectX (and faster CPUs and more memory) would later
mitigate this issue but in the early days of Win9x, this was a
significant problem with the new OS

Secondly, Microsoft was battling against its own reputation. While
Win95 was an improvement, gamers could not help but compare it with
Windows 3, which was just /awful/ for games. Windows 3.x was slow, it
was crash-prone, and its pitiful HAL meant most games could not
utilize the more esoteric features of the hardware to their fullest potential. Win3 didn't really offer /any/ advantages over playing a
game in DOS. Game selection was also an issue: in DOS, we had games
like Need for Speed and TIE Fighter; meanwhile, the best Win3x had to
offer was Myst and Outpost. Given this background, gamers expected
the same from Win95 (and in the early days of the new OS, those
worries were justified). Any benefits Win9x brought to the table just
weren't enough to counter balance the disadvantages.

Thirdly, DOS gamers - and especially those who posted to Usenet - were familiar with the eccentricities of DOS. Tweaking config.sys and
maximizing lower RAM were arts we had long mastered; playing games on
Win9x would require an entirely new skill-set (and in these early days
of the internet, this sort of information was much harder to get). It
seemed a lot of extra effort for no real advantage

Fourth, many of us had extensive DOS game collections (I still do!),
many games of which ran poorly or not at all in Win9x. Yes, newer Win9x-native games might run fine, but the whole dual-booting to DOS
thing was really annoying. So if I was going to have dual boot anyway,
why bother with Windows95?

So there were a number of good reasons why people looked askance at
Windows95 and wondered why we couldn't just stay with DOS. After all,
DOS had worked well enough to get us classics like Warcraft, Wing
Commander III, so its not like DOS wasn't a capable gaming platform. Meanwhile, Win95 was unproven, top-heavy and the only real point of comparison people had was Windows 3.1. It is no surprise that there
was such an outcry.

(Myself, I was fairly slow to upgrade to Win9x, moving over only in
late '96 or early '97. All the games I was interested in were
DOS-based, and I had customized Win3x to be quite usable. I was less concerned with the performance issue than I was with the new learning
curve and saw no advantage to the new OS. Even afterwards, I still
maintained a dual-boot, often switching back to DOS and Win3x. While
not overtly hostile to Win95 - I knew eventually I would have to
upgrade - I understood some of the anger espoused by other users. DOS worked, so why mess around with that?)

Ultimately, Windows would prove itself the better platform but it took several years and it really wasn't until Windows98 that its victory
was assured. Oddly enough, Windows' biggest advantage to gaming was
one that was almost invisible to the player. It wasn't any performance
gains, or the UI, or the Add/Remove Programs installers: it was
drivers. Although we take Windows drivers for granted now, they were a radical new idea in 1995.

In DOS, if a game wanted to support the Soundblaster AWE, or 3DFX, or
a Thrustmaster joystick, or a Zoom modem, the game developer would
have to write drivers for each piece of hardware. Especially given the proliferation of new hardware in the mid to late 90s, this was a
daunting task. Win9x simplified this by offering a decent hardware abstraction layer. Now the hardware manufacturers provided the driver
which alerted the OS - and any game running on Win9x - as to that
hardwares capabilities. It greatly simplified the developer's job,
allowed better scaling of game to computers capabilities and allowed developers to better make use of more esoteric features of hardware. Meanwhile, on the end-user side, the gamer could just plug in a game
without worrying if it would work with his joystick or sound-card.
Without this significant advantage, Win9x probably would not have made
the quick inroads to PC gaming as it did.

Anyway, its easy to look back and think "oh, those silly gamers of
1995!" but their concerns were valid and justified at the time.
Windows 95 was unproven, Microsoft had a bad track record when it came
to its operating systems, there were no real indications that things
would improve, and the performance hits were significant. It is no
wonder people were clamoring for DOS versions of new games.

Well, that was true up to Quake I. Later, with Quake II,
DirectX gave more performance
on gaming than with the pure and raw DOS system calls.
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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg

On Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:42:52 -0000 (UTC), Bozo User
<anthk@disroot.org> wrote:

Well, that was true up to Quake I. Later, with Quake II,
DirectX gave more performance
on gaming than with the pure and raw DOS system calls.

I mean, yes and no?

There weren't really any DOS system calls for most hardware; DOS was
extremely bare-boned after all and beyond support for very basic video routines, there wasn't much it could do for games. That's why almost
every game developer who wrote DOS games made their own video routines
to access the video hardware directly, bypassing DOS. And with full
access to the hardware, performance could (and in some cases did)
easily surpass that of even the best DirectX access, just because
there were fewer hoops to jump through.

The downside, though, was that the developer had to code directly to
the hardware, which essentially meant writing their own drivers for
each and every piece of hardware. This was a monumental task that
required a huge amount of effort (so much so that most DOS game
developers just outsourced it), potentially led to bugs or poor
performance, and heaven help the poor gamer who didn't have hardware
on the pre-approved list of compatible video-cards. The big advantage
to DirectX was not so much that it could out-perform bare-metal
programming, but that it was much more convenient, much easier, and
less expensive and time-consuming for the developers. It's performance
was close enough to bare-metal too, that that any discrepancies
between the two were far outweighed by the advantages to consumer and developer.

But you could have get better performance if you coded directly to the hardware... which meant DOS (or a variation of Linux, or a home-coded
OS) and not Windows.

But ultimately, it's all moot. With a huge proliferation in the
variety of hardware, there was no way game developers could keep up
with coding directly to the thousands of different sound and video
chipsets, so they would never have been able to take advantage of that potentially superior performance. Even in 1995, DOS gamers were lucky
if a developer offered a patch that let them take full advantage of
their 3DFX or Virge video card so it could run in accelerated mode. As
CPUs became more powerful, the hit from the hardware abstraction layer
became less and less significant too. And the other advantages of
Windows95 - networking, multi-tasking, etc. - proved too popular
amongst users for DOS to ever win out.

But in 1995 - when most people thought "Windows 3.1" when thinking of
Windows, and 486s remained the most-used CPU - there were real
concerns about the viability of Windows95.



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