People have short memories. XP was vilified when it was released, partly because of bugs, but also because 9x was substantially faster for games as Scali mentioned, and continued to be until about two years later when the drivers matured. The same happened with Vista - whilst it was buggy, an awful lot of the issues were with badly written drivers or applications. By the time Windows 7 turned up, the drivers had improved (the difference between WDDM 1.0 (Vista) and WDDM 1.1 (7) being much smaller than going from XP's driver model).

Late nineties it was entirely possible to run most of your games through Glide, and OpenGL, and NT 4 worked fine with that. I was busy playing Quake 2, Tomb Raider 3, and all the Infinity Engine games.

NT/2K: extremely stable enterprise class OS': no home use intended.
9X/ME: unstable SOHO class OS' home use intended.

ynari wrote:

Late nineties it was entirely possible to run most of your games through Glide, and OpenGL, and NT 4 worked fine with that. I was busy playing Quake 2, Tomb Raider 3, and all the Infinity Engine games.

Yup, sadly I didn't have a VooDoo though, I had a PowerVR PCX2 card in those days. It didn't have NT4-support at all.
On Win9x I got PowerSGL, D3D and MiniGL support.

This was meant to go somewhere on the previous page. Teach me to go and have a smoke in the middle of writing a post.

Indeed, I do wonder if my blue light sphere (an effect I use in videos sometimes for title cards) would have rendered any faster in NT as the software is likely optimized for that environment. It managed fine under 3.11 though - Pentium 60 with Trio 32 1MB if anyone wondered what system it was.

If it had support for Win 3.11 (probably win32s) it wouldn't run any faster on NT.

It's also important to note, that while the Win32 API was made for NT,
Win32s on Windows 3.1 was the first implementation available to the public.
This is quite interesting, as some early programs can run on Win 3.1 just fine, but refuse to run on Win NT 3.1.
Even more, there were -at least in theory- a few programs which would only execute on Win32s, but not on NT or 9X.
They made heavy use of the thunking API and shared memory. I once read an article about that.
It was in byte magazine, I think.

elianda wrote:

- 2D accelerated graphics (like BitBlt calls) are handled much faster than on Win9x. This is related to the driver backend. I have some benchs with e.g. Tom2D that shows like 10 times faster performance (P166MMX / Riva128). Thus games relying on DirectDraw3 like e.g. Diablo benefit from this..

True. There also was a heavy discussion back then when MS moved GDI from user level to kernel level.
They abandoned stability in favor of speed. Because of this, servers and other important machines
were forced to run in VGA mode only. It wasn't until Vista this was fixed.

HighTreason wrote:

This rates another point; No direct hardware access. Anything relying on that will not work properly or at the very least might lag or behave unpredictably. One only has to try "echo BURP! > COM1" to see how the OS handles things differently in that regard, preferably with a device listening on the other end..

Good point. This was one of the biggest reasons to avoid the NT line back then.
If you were into hardware development, a ham or if you were just a DIY person (do-it-yourself; a person who built their own stuff;
now called a maker), this was a pure nightmare!
For example, if you had an EPROM programmer on the parallel port it was impossible to use it on NT.
There simply was no usable API for the LPT port. And direct hardware access was prohibited.
The same applies for other devices, such as CNC machines, robots, dongles for expensive software (acad) or just a covox plug.
Since XP we had got solutions like porttalk or port.dll, but back then this was a serious tragedy (here even OS/2 was less restrictive).

ynari wrote:

People have short memories. XP was vilified when it was released, partly because of bugs, but also because 9x was substantially faster for games as Scali mentioned, and continued to be until about two years later when the drivers matured. The same happened with Vista - whilst it was buggy, an awful lot of the issues were with badly written drivers or applications. By the time Windows 7 turned up, the drivers had improved (the difference between WDDM 1.0 (Vista) and WDDM 1.1 (7) being much smaller than going from XP's driver model).

Late nineties it was entirely possible to run most of your games through Glide, and OpenGL, and NT 4 worked fine with that. I was busy playing Quake 2, Tomb Raider 3, and all the Infinity Engine games.

I never disliked XP. Even when it was brand new, without any service packs.
My first thought was "Finally a real operating system!". I was so happy when my emulator software worked the first time and my old Win3.1 games ran well.
I upgraded my Pentium 166 MMX from 24MB to 64Mb just for XP! I was so happy when it successfully installed on my 2GB SCSI drive. 😄
Don't get me wrong, Win98 was part of my childhood and I used it for many years, but XP was such a stress relief!
The only real issue of early XP was the missing firewall. The sasser worm was somewhat nasty. 😒
But Win98 didn't have a firewall either (Kerio ? haha, good joke).

I upgraded my Pentium 166 MMX from 24MB to 64Mb just for XP!

Are you sure you aren't mistaking XP for Windows 2000? Windows NT real life minimum was 32MB. For W2K it was 64MB and XP was more like 128MB. It would run on less but at what "cost".

I didn't move up to XP until 2005 when I want SMP and had no choice. I still haven't completely moved away from it and due to my cartoon still being a work in progress and the software it requires, I still have to keep a powerful Win9x machine running solely for that project, though I plan to use the one I am going to put together more because I much prefer the interface. Never much liked the interface in XP and despise the Vista/7 interface. 8 and 10 are a bit better, but nothing ever came close to the speed and efficiency you could work with in Windows 98SE.

On the direct hardware access thing; I remember discovering with an EEPROM Programmer I had years ago that it would write corrupted data to the IC quite often despite claiming to be supported in Win2K, luckily this was back when I was mostly Win98SE anyway so this proved to be of little concern, by the time I moved to XP the device had long since died anyway.

hyoenmadan wrote:

Dominus wrote:

I don't see any reason for NT. On Windows 3.x you can run a lot of games. Most of them run the same on Windows 9x BUT you can run Windows 3.x in Dosbox eithout any problem 😉

Errr... there are a vast world outside games, you know.

The question I replied to was what people are using NT or Windows 3.1 NOW.

Except for special cases, mostly businesses with old software, I don't see much point of running Windows 3.1 or NT (I assumed the old NT (<= 4) , not the modern one) these days.
Do you? Can you name one (except for the act of being able to run something and special business cases) or is being condescending all you have?

Well.... Don't forget that XP is Just another fancy name for NT-5.1 i guess Vista is NT6? Not shure. Anyway.... Everything past Win-ME is basically Win-NT with a fancy name slapped on the visible part.

Yes, Vista is NT6, Win7 is 6.1, Win8 is 6.2, Win8.1 is 6.3, and Win10 used to be 6.4 in the early betas, before they changed it to 10.0. The numbering scheme is pretty arbitrary.

And while I learned about some interesting nuances about the differences between 9x and NT in this thread, the biggest thing it did for me is make me want to install WIndows ME on my Thinkpad A31p. 😀

kixs wrote:

I upgraded my Pentium 166 MMX from 24MB to 64Mb just for XP!

Are you sure you aren't mistaking XP for Windows 2000? Windows NT real life minimum was 32MB. For W2K it was 64MB and XP was more like 128MB. It would run on less but at what "cost".

Yup, it was XP, running at the bare minimum requirements. That may look silly now, but back then I couldn't afford more memory.
Haven't got a copy of 2K until recently (cool OS, btw - very lightweight). So it really was XP, still remember the colourful blue taskbar..
It was such a drastic change after years of grey melancholy (I loved the white/blue 2D look of 3.1 nevertheless).
Everything appeared to be much more friendly. Icons were in full colour and even the speech in XP was a tad bit more friendly (applications were nolonger "terminated").
All in all, it reflected the mood of that time. The new millennium arrived and for a short time there was this strong feeling of
hope and euphoria of a better future. Then facebook came along and people became silly. 😉
But that's just my opinion, I also liked the translucent design of the iMac G3 or the Aqua look of MacOS X upto 10.4.

Another difference that I was taught in school in 1995, was that NT was not only more stable, it offered true sequrity over Win9X.
Yeah.... Win-9X was not even a true multitasking OS, it's an taskmanager system instead. Our teacher laughed at Win9X compared to NT and Os/2. NT 3 and 4 series can run on HPFS and Os/2 can run on NTFS.

Every time Windows XP started up, all I could see in my head was this; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZCgbGgA-_8

I hate that show! Probably explains why there are so many millennials acting retarded on Facefook. Nah, I think people were always that stupid, it's just that they now have an easily accessible platform to be so in public. Facebook has strong links to Jeremy Kyle and so far as I know, Jerry Springer was around, and did well, long before Fecebook was ever conceived.

relax, please

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-ycQlfOqyY I hate that hedgehog! (But the show was OK).

I am relaxed, so what's the problem? The Teletubbies did suck and the default Windows XP "Bliss" wallpaper did have that vibe to it. It doesn't anymore, seems to be farm land now.

While we're on that subject, I may as well point out common knowledge and add the obligatory information; Windows XP appears to contain code from DOS 5.0 in its VDM (Virtual DOS Machine) - Windows 9X and ME use versions 7 and 8 respectively. Also, what was the damn point in the DOS Startup disk option for floppies in XP? It wasn't like most people could use it to do anything as they would have been running an NTFS file system which could not be accessed.

Also, was 9X ever available for non-x86 platforms? Or was that NT only? I seem to think it was NT only and undoubtedly CE. - ha, "CE ME NT".

HighTreason wrote:

Also, was 9X ever available for non-x86 platforms? Or was that NT only? I seem to think it was NT only and undoubtedly CE. - ha, "CE ME NT".

Yeah... Only NT4, not 9X ran on other platform's. RISC it was, though what RISC systems? I can't remember straight from my head.
The Computer Chronicles had it shown at one point on the series.

If you hate teletubbies, then search "nazitubbies". A danish show, were they make fun of Hitler-Nazi's and teletubbies.
Just you'r typically Danish dark humor. Yeah... One of them are originally from Korea. 😁

brostenen wrote:

HighTreason wrote:

Also, was 9X ever available for non-x86 platforms? Or was that NT only? I seem to think it was NT only and undoubtedly CE. - ha, "CE ME NT".

Yeah... Only NT4, not 9X ran on other platform's. RISC it was, though what RISC systems? I can't remember straight from my head.

I know there was a PowerPC version of NT 4, possibly 3.51 as well.

So easy to find.... Why have I not looked before? 🤣

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms

Um...

brassicGamer wrote:

Microsoft developed it to be processor-independent which is why there are versions of it for Intel, DEC ALPHA, MIPS and even PowerPC platforms.

I always wanted to run NT on another architecture but never had the means or opportunity. Similarly, I have only ever run Solaris on SPARC, and always wanted to try it on x86. I'll never forget the first time I realised I could run a non Microsoft OS on a PC. Putting Linux on my Xbox was a similarly exciting experience.