<story><title>DOS/4GW made Windows 95 game compatibility easier, but with higher stakes</title><url>https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230829-00/?p=108661</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PreInternet01</author><text>It is, especially in hindsight, difficult to appreciate how big a deal DPMI was.&lt;p&gt;But to try to give you an idea: I was in an OS&amp;#x2F;2 seminar (because, well, OS&amp;#x2F;2 was the &lt;i&gt;future&lt;/i&gt; at that point in time) when someone from Microsoft circulated photocopies of an early DPMI document.&lt;p&gt;This instantly divided the audience in two groups: those who &lt;i&gt;got&lt;/i&gt; it (and abandoned the OS&amp;#x2F;2 hype train that instant), and those who did not.&lt;p&gt;When (some years later: Internet time was not yet invented either) Windows 95 came out with pretty much flawless DOS compatibility, whereas OS&amp;#x2F;2 was still struggling to run more than one DOS app simultaneously (with DOS apps still being &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; much the only revenue-positive game in town), OS&amp;#x2F;2 was effectively dead.&lt;p&gt;Sure, NT put the nails in the coffin, but it would be a few years before typical consumer&amp;#x2F;business hardware could reliably run that. With DPMI (an API, not even a product...), Microsoft settled the OS wars (as they were at the time...) decisively.</text></comment>
<story><title>DOS/4GW made Windows 95 game compatibility easier, but with higher stakes</title><url>https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230829-00/?p=108661</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mromanuk</author><text>&amp;gt; Miraculously, most games just worked despite running under a different DPMI server from what they were originally developed with. There were occasional issues with specific games. Popular ones include games which assumed that all memory was physical and games which assumed the interrupt flag was unvirtualized, but for the most part, things worked well enough that the remaining issues could be treated as app-specific bugs.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s funny because at that moment in time I was running DOS games, and most of them worked without issues and I was thinking that Win95, wasn&amp;#x27;t too different and just a UI, like it was Win 3.1x</text></comment>