when Bethesda Underarockworks finally realized there's a popular operating system being used for games.

i believe arround the time when DirectX 3/5 was quite decent for 2D graphics.

Yeah, Windows 95 and DirectX were what made Windows viable for gaming. Combined the result is close to DOS's "to the metal" aspect while also making PC gaming a lot easier for developers and users alike. Games started to arrive quickly once Win95 was available in 1996.

I know Diablo was a pretty big deal when it was released at the tail end of 1996 (really more like early 1997 since it was released on the 31st of December 🤣), and that was a Win95 title. What were some of the other populsr Win9x iitles released in 1996?

Tomb Raider, Wing Commander 4 and The DIG was in DOS, Tomb Raider 2, Wing Commander Prophecy and Monkey Island 3 were on Windows. So for me that was the cut off.

Especially for strategy games there was a transitional period where they would release versions for both DOS and Win95, often on the same CD (MoO2, HoMM2) or seperate (C&C RA, with SVGA only for Windows, which caused some complaints). This was all in that 1996 timeframe, after that year virtually everything was Win95; the last big DOS release would have been Shadow Warrior a year later.

I always play Win95 versions of games that were released for both operating systems. Can't quite put my finger on it but there is something about the mouse control that feels a lot better compared to DOS... back in the day I never noticed such details when playing the DOS version of Warcraft II though.

I would probably say 1997 was the beginning of the end, sure we got DOS games coming out that year but that was also when Windows gaming was really starting to pick up speed and then when 1998 hit, that was when Windows became the norm. Of course I might be missing details, but that was what I remember during those times.

Sierra was always a stern believer in the Windows platform, I remember they marketed their Win95 games even before Windows 95 was available, which probably wasn't hard to do as they already made most of their games for Windows 3.
I think 1997 was the end for Dos as most games by then would have at least a Windows version besides the Dos one (Carmageddon, Mechwarrior 2, Flying Corps).

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.

d1stortion wrote:

Especially for strategy games there was a transitional period where they would release versions for both DOS and Win95, often on the same CD (MoO2, HoMM2) or seperate (C&C RA, with SVGA only for Windows, which caused some complaints). This was all in that 1996 timeframe, after that year virtually everything was Win95; the last big DOS release would have been Shadow Warrior a year later.

I always play Win95 versions of games that were released for both operating systems. Can't quite put my finger on it but there is something about the mouse control that feels a lot better compared to DOS... back in the day I never noticed such details when playing the DOS version of Warcraft II though.

Completely agree with your assessment on the 1996 timeframe. My father got a 150mhz Pentium laptop in 1996 and most of the games and demos I played on it were DOS. I remember having huge problems getting sound and SVGA to work 😜 Moving on to 1997 almost all the games had Windows 95 versions. I can only think of Blood and Shadow Warrior as big DOS only titles released in 1997.

Redguard was probably one of the last commercially released DOS games, coming out in late 1998.

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

I think that networking (and also internet) finally pushed DOS from table

For me, the last great DOS game was Liero 1.33, which was released in 1998.
(Honorable mention: Jump 'n Bump)

schlang wrote:

I think that networking (and also internet) finally pushed DOS from table

Makes sense. I wonder though, what was so difficult about developing a working TCP/IP stack for DOS? I know that they came into existence later on, but why were they practically nonexistant in the mid 90s? Was it just because nobody fathomed the idea of browsing the web on a non-GUI OS? 🤣

You would never(hardly?) choose to play games under windows 95 if you had the choice for dos in the early days as it took a significant performance hit, especially when you had a cyrix 5x86 like myself.