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 > 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
