On Thu, 1 Aug 2024 at 13:23, cz via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > Windows NT and 2000 did not have the "cut through" ability for apps to > talk to video without going through security proxies, thus games were > always terrible on them. > > Windows XP was the first OS (well aside from Windows 95/ME/whatever) > that allowed fast access. This made it a security sinkhole, but everyone > loved it and that's why it was adopted as the standard for so long.
I'm not specifically agreeing or disagreeing here, but I did read back at the time that something like what you describe applied to NT4, although I do not remember details. I think you could install DirectX but it didn't actually connect to the graphics card: it always did software rendering and performance was poor. Only actual OpenGL was hardware-accelerated, as it had been on NT 3.x as well. I'm not a gamer and wasn't then, and I never investigated it much at the time. On the magazine I wrote for then, Windows 98 was known as dismissively as "GameOS" and nobody seriously wanted to play games on NT4. I thought, but am not sure, that Win2K fixed this. The main visible "improvements" in XP were themes, faster boot/shutdown, compression of memory images so that hibernation and resume were much quicker, and some bundled tools (Movie Maker, File and Settings Transfer Wizard, etc.) The real change was external, in the PC hardware market and ecosystem: by the time XP shipped, most hardware vendors offered NT drivers for their hardware, firmware was more NT-compatible, games had been cleaned of code that hit the metal and worked via legal Windows APIs, and so on. So a new PC in 2002 worked much better with XP than a late-1990s PC did, and games worked on XP, etc... but that wasn't due to any particular change in the OS, it was that the hardware and software market had caught up and stopped making unsafe DOS calls, shipping direct-hardware-bashing VxD drivers, etc. MS knew this but spun it as "XP merges Windows 98 and 2000 to give you the best of both worlds, rich media and gaming with NT stability" -- but in actual fact no convergence had happened. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven IoM: (+44) 7624 277612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884 Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053
