Igor Obraztsov wrote:
I know, I might be the last person in the world to do it, but today I finallySNIP
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???
Yep...
Tabb
Igor Obraztsov wrote:
I know, I might be the last person in the world to do it, but today I finallySNIP
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???
Yep...
Tabb
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 finallySNIP
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???
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.
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.
Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
I found that 8MB was actually sweet spot for Windows 95. While the
older version of Windows used significantly less memory, Windows 95 had
a much more advanced disk caching. On Windows 3.1 (and plain MS-DOS)
you were stuck with a fixed size disk cache, but Windows 95 (like modern >operating systems) used all of free memory as a disk cache. The size
of disk cache would automatically shrink or grow depending on the memory >demands of the programs you were using.
On a 8MB machine running Windows 3.1, you'd set the disk cache to 1MB so >you'd have plenty of free memory for applications. However, not a lot of >applications needed that much memory, so a lot of the time a large chunk
of RAM was sitting unused. Because Windows 95 could use that unused RAM
as cache it would often peform better than Windows 3.1 on 8MB machines.
That's one of the reason why I played X-COM Apocalypse under Windows
98 rather than plain MS-DOS. With MS-DOS I was limited to whatever the >maximum SMARTDRV cache was (32MB?) but under Windows 98 it could easly
fit the entire game (~200MB) in its disk cache.
My memory says 16MB for Win95 but it's been 23 years so I'll defer to
argue. Besides, memory prices were dropping so rapidly during that era
that the sweet spot probably moved about quite a bit ;-)
Technically it required only 4MB but that was /really/ painful. It
booted, but the OS itself was slow (lots of paging) and things dragged
to a crawl if you had the temerity to actually open an app. I vaguely
recall somebody even hacked the OS - patched out win.com's memory
check and then pared down the rest of the OS - so it ran on 2MB but I
can't imagine that was a very useful build.
But in the first couple of years of Windows95, it was definitely a
concern, as many DOS games did have better performance than their
Win95 equivalents.
Honestly, this was more a theoretical problem for me. For the most part
when I started gaming under Windows 95, which was actually when it was in beta before it was released, I would play MS-DOS games under Windows 95
if could. The ability to ALT-TAB to do something was just too invaluable.
The real problem for me was games that wouldn't work under Windows 95,
like Ultima 7 and Wing Commander: Privateer because their bizarre (and >stupid) memory managers.
Even a game like Master of Magic was a pain
to get working under Windows 95 because of the amount of conventional
memory it needed.
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 finallySNIP
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???
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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