I believe the biggest selling factor from Microsoft was that all drivers had 
been converted to 32-bit in xp. Prior to that, there were still some 16 bitters 
around.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 1, 2024, at 09:12, Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> 
> wrote:
> 
> 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
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