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NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2025 14:30:31 +0000
From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: Well, it's about time (HD on Win3)
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2025 10:30:25 -0400
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On Sat, 15 Mar 2025 01:28:38 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

>Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, 14 Mar 2025 05:51:10 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

>> >So, play Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc. ;)

>> Not with the above-mentioned driver, though. Apparently, with the
>> current version of the driver, Solitaire.exe crashes ;-)
>> But WinDoom runs fine though, and that's what counts.

>That's funny that runs but not WIndows 3's included own games. 
>I remember being impresed by WinDOOM with its more audio channels!


I remember just being impressed that "Doom" ran in Windows at all! 

Windows 3.x up to that point was so abjectly bad at games up to that
point; the platform was seen as 'okay' for slow-moving games like
"Civilization" or "Myst" but for anything where the screen updated
quickly, DOS was seen as the superior option. The WinG API --which can
be seen as a sort of prototype "DirectX" for Windows3.x-- was a
revelation in how it finally allowed action games on the platform. All
of a sudden games like "Pitfall: Mayan Adventure", "Earthsiege 2" and
"Fury" became possible.

It still wasn't a good idea, because the Win3 stack was so top-heavy
and demanded more resources from a game than you'd get if you stuck
with DOS, but it paved the way for the Windows95 revolution. For all
its other problems, Windows did offer a lot of benefits to developers,
such as not having to write their own memory management, or
sound/video-card drivers. Windows95 that took off with the concept,
but it was Windows 3/WinG that paved the way.

If there's one thing I actually liked about Windows 3.x, it was how
easy it was to completely customize the user interface. To some degree
this has persisted even up through Windows 11, but with Win3.x it was
possible to change pretty much everything about the shell, and do it
very easily.