mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:Wasn't the FPS genre a particularly major 9x holdout in/around 1997? The only major FPS I can think of from 1996 or 1997 that required Win95 was Quake II. Granted, there was also GLQuake and QuakeWorld, but these are basically just alternate EXEs for Quake, and not entirely different games.
Part of the reason for that is because FPS games were difficult to develop and there was still a lot of fallout from Windows 95 launching without a way to directly access video hardware. In fact, most of the late DOS titles before everything had shifted to Windows were 3D games. The other reasoning too was that it was taking awhile for everyone to shift over so making your game for DOS still ensured the largest possible audience. Heck, when Descent 3 was still in the works, they had a forum open for people to make suggestions and a HUGE number of people wanted the game to work in DOS, myself included. XD
However, APIs like Glide and OpenGL, in combination with DirectX, were making it more attractive to make a game on Windows since you could avoid the whole sound-driver and joystick-driver nonsense and just make something that worked... mostly. It took awhile for things to standardize and even now things continue to change, especially with Microsoft's stuff, not so much with OpenGL.
Windows 98 kinda sealed DOS' fate, being the substantial upgrade to Windows 95 that it was that managed to trump ME and even XP for a short period of time thanks to UPnP. :P
--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
--- Ancient DOS Games Webshow: www.pixelships.com/adg