dormcat wrote on 2023-03-17, 13:53:

IMHO Win95 is more like an interim OS: nice to have but not necessary for games and applications

True, Windows 95 often seems to be just a beta version of 98SE.
Unfortunately, the 98 is unnecesarily bloated - not a problem with Pentium II/III and plenty of RAM, but on an average Pentium 75 machine it's sure to need thorough surgery (eg. 98 Lite) to run as fast as the 95.

If the goal is to run DOS stuff, then with BootGUI=0 there's no speed difference between 95OSR2, 98, and 98SE.

Grzyb wrote on 2023-03-17, 13:16:

Depends of the HDD size... […]
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Depends of the HDD size...

> 2 GB - FAT32 pretty much necessary, therefore Windows 95 OSR2
528 MB .. 2 GB - FAT32 not necessary, but nice to have due to smaller allocation units
< 528 MB - FAT16 only, and DOS+Windows 3.1x occupy less space

You also get FAT32 with DOS 7, no need to waste time (and HDD space) on a GUI

The reason for Windows 3.1 is not games, it’s productivity. You can use it for word processing, spreadsheets, etc if you install MS Office 4.3, and browsing the internet with Netscape 3 and WebOne proxy.

DOS and Windows 9x are for games, but games that want 9x probably also would benefit from a 3D accelerator, and then you have a different class of machine.

Grzyb wrote on 2023-03-17, 14:29:

True, Windows 95 often seems to be just a beta version of 98SE.
Unfortunately, the 98 is unnecesarily bloated - not a problem with Pentium II/III and plenty of RAM, but on an average Pentium 75 machine it's sure to need thorough surgery (eg. 98 Lite) to run as fast as the 95.

If the goal is to run DOS stuff, then with BootGUI=0 there's no speed difference between 95OSR2, 98, and 98SE.

98lite is awesome with little bit more low spec systems. I have one Tulip 166MMX with 64MB (supports up to 128MB, but only 64MB cacheable) and 98lite is the way. System has built in 10MB network as well as USB, so you get all the good stuff from 98SE, such as USB storage support and many out of the box drivers, with the performance of Win95.

UltimateElectronic wrote on 2023-03-16, 21:36:

I currently have a P200MMX running 95 so should I go for 95 or 3.1? I'm exclusively using it for DOS games so I'd imagine the OS wouldn't make a huge difference.

If just a dos gaming box, i would go with dos 6.22 and win 3.11 all the way. But if you have win95 already installed and its running ok then i would stick with it. My 2¢ 😀

keenmaster486 wrote on 2023-03-17, 15:28:

The reason for Windows 3.1 is not games, it’s productivity. You can use it for word processing, spreadsheets, etc if you install MS Office 4.3, and browsing the internet with Netscape 3 and WebOne proxy.

DOS and Windows 9x are for games, but games that want 9x probably also would benefit from a 3D accelerator, and then you have a different class of machine.

Wait.. My childhood was all but a lie ? 😿

Edit: Classic Windows 3.1 games and programs live again thanks to the Internet Archive So that's fake news ?

another vote for "whichever OS you want to use on it", personally i'd choose w95 just for ease of use and no performance issue on a p75 (I used to have a P75 with 8 then 16 mb ram with windows 95 and a friend at the time had a 486-66 and was envious of the sheer performance! 😀 )

Jo22 wrote on 2023-03-17, 16:53:

Wait.. My childhood was all but a lie ? 😿

YES, THAT'S RIGHT, YES!

Personally, I don't like Windows 3.1. It's not as simplistic as DOS (with file manager) and not as GUI intuitive as Windows 95. If something is broken in DOS, it's easier to fix it Win9x environment.

P1/75 was my first own computer and back in the day it was used with win95. It was shipped with Win3.11 in 1995, though) I think 95 os ok for any pentium or 486DX4-100. For DX2-66 3.11 is better )
I recently few days ago) installed win95osr2 on one more p1/75 - Siemens-Nixdorf at my country place - also Photoshop 5.0LE, Word 6.0, Acdsee16, winamp, and of coure a lot of games... But it depends of HDD - that time I used 40GB IDE HDD limited to 4.8 GB using MHDD and then using Ontrack Disk MAnager 7.0 to allow the computer to detect it and work with it... So I have two partitions of 2gb and one of about 800 mb) Also you can use boot managers that allows to choose between pure ms dos and win95 on startup - so you can have win 95 and 3.11 at one hdd - I use Acronys OS Selector for that on some 486 - p1 machines)

I too have been configuring a Pentium75 for some time and I had set it up as a super-fast dos machine, so with dos 6.22 and win 3.11 just to manage files more simply. But reading this discussion made me reevaluate the idea of ​​using win95. I'm just not able to bypass the graphical interface, but should I also create the classic confug.sys and autoexec as in pure dos? and if I started the machine later by typing "win" and pressing enter, how would it behave with the two configuration files?

I like the Win31 GUI, but it's not for games. You can obviously make games for it but it is not a game-friendly platform. Game devs largely stuck with DOS pretty much until DirectX arrived.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2023-03-18, 02:14:

I like the Win31 GUI, but it's not for games. You can obviously make games for it but it is not a game-friendly platform. Game devs largely stuck with DOS pretty much until DirectX arrived.

Commercial games, yes. I don't mean to say you're wrong. It's just.. that I have different memories here. 😅 I grew up with the shareware scene, rather. A parallel reality, so to say.
In the 90s, I often bought my shareware CD-ROM at places like Walmart or in a nearby PC store. Not just for games, but also articles (disk mags), applications and GIF files.
Indie game programmers with Visual Basic 3, Borland C++/Quick C++ and so on did develop for Windows 3 since the early 90s.
I'm thinking about Gnu Chess, Warpath!, the Adventures of Micro Man, Space Exploration Alpha 1 etc. Those were really fun little desktop games.
Not unlike those on Atari ST of the 80s (on TOS/GEM). Some games like Comet Busters! even used the WaveMix DLL and WinG API.

Commercial games like Myst, Creatures! or those Edutainment titles (Putty, Freddy Fish etc) and Sierra games ran on Windows 3.1x, too.
Then there were shutter glasses for virtual reality. They ran on DOS and Windows 3.1, but not on Windows 95 anymore (timing issues, interrupt latency, direct i/o).
Their problem was the use of the serial port. In the 90s I had a different problem with a radio-controlled clock for serial port (a DCF-77 receiver). Worked fine on DOS or 3.1x only.
Sure, glasses like the ELSA 3D Revelator provided VR/3D on Windows 95. But that was a different era. Not that of Descent, the VFX-1 or the old school VR applications.

Windows 3.1x simply was part of a different era - the early 90s. The early 90s were a weird cross-over time of the 80s and 90s.
In essence, it was 80s people with 90s hardware. Very different from the late Windows 95/early Windows 98 days.
For example, stereoscopic pictures were a thing in the early-mid 90s. Or Kodak Photo CDs. There was plenty of Windows 3.x software for it. Or let's take ISDN..
Then there were Video CD, CD-i etc (remember Xing MPEG Player ?). All popular in the 1993-1994 time frame.. In the Windows 95 days, that was almost gone.
Windows 95 RTM is kind of an odd beast, thus. It lacks DirectX, FAT32 and can't do properly support PCI/AGP and ACPI/APIC yet (unless patched).
Other things like ray-tracing (POVRay etc) also were a thing in the Windows 3.x and OS/2 2.1x/3.0 days. Or let's take MOD music..

That's why I think that Windows 95 is a very tricky topic, as such. Windows 95 doesn't equal Windows 95. Too many iterations. 😅
Windows 95 RTM is more like a Windows 3.1x in the middle of metamorphosis. Windows 95 B/C like an inferior version of Windows 98/SE.
Windows 95 RTM still saw things like early online services (CompuServe, AOL, Genie, etc), 386SX PCs and ISA/VLB cards.
I've written more about my memories many years ago over here: Re: Win95. yea or nay?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, - err -, in Japan of the early-mid 90s, visual novels used to run on Windows 3.1x+Win32s and Windows 95.. 😀
Both Windows versions were providing platform Independence between FM Towns, PC-98 and DOS/V PCs (ATs).
However, their device drivers were much more quirky than the western versions (due to proprietary hardware), it seems.
Slapping Windows 95 on an existing Windows 3.1 PC didn't work as easily/as well as it worked here.

Edit: Here's an visually interesting 3D game for Windows 3.1x/95 - Fury3:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fury3

According to Mobygames (which recenly got broken really bad, but these stats are still possible to find), the first year with more games for Windows than for DOS was 1997.
That's when Pentium II was released.
So, I wouldn't venture into Windows gaming with anything below P2.

Sure, there's the exception for all those little toys like Minesweeper, but for them the Windows version doesn't matter - even 3.0 is often good enough.

Rather than an academic discussion on whether there were games for a platform, shouldn't we see what OP actually wants to do?

If Civ 2 and BI 3 are on the list, Windows in some form or other is called for, if it's just FOS games not.

I would go for Windows 3.11

Quick and easy to install and great for file management and copying stuff from network resourses.

I'm not sure if that's helpful, but the site The Wonderful World of Windows used to describe the game's situation of the 90s.

It said:

"What Windows Meant for Games


A GUI and Window Manager

This is the most obvious feature. Windows takes care of a good part of the interface.
It became very poular for games that run best with mouse support, like Mastermind or card games
The possibilities of multiple windows and toolboxes were less often explored by game designers, Klotz, SimCity, and WinSP are a few examples.

A Hardware Abstraction Layer

In the 90s, memory restrictions and the lack of real standards for soundcards and graphics above VGA increasingly became a problem for game development.
Arena and Tetris Pro are near impossible to get to run on actual hardware because of the difficulty to free enough conventional RAM.
Early SVGA games often run on specific cards only. Windows 3.1 took care of all that (the previous versions hadn't supported sound, or graphics above VGA).
That was the main reason Entombed was a Windows game, according to the developers.

Modularity and Standards

Windows was a huge step forward in modularity. If you look at Gorillas, one of the sample games for QBasic,
you will find that all the graphics are generated directly in the code.
Under Windows, graphics and other media were generally stored in a few standard formats.
It was a lot easier now to reuse stuff, too: P. Höhn's Memory used various icons for graphics,
Philippe Basciano used the fruits from Jerry J.Shekhel's Pac-Man clone Chomp for his Columns clone Fructus.

A Short History

Windows 3.0

Bitmap graphics increasingly replaced vector graphics.
Programs compiled under Windows 3.0 usually run without problems on all later 16- and 32-bit versions,
though some are sensitive to processor speed.
With few exceptions, these games run in 16 colors (the standard Windows palette) and have no or little sound.

Windows now became increasingly interesting for commercial developers.
Various companies released game packs for this platform, most famous Microsoft's Entertainment Pack for Windows.
Battle Chess and SimCity saw Windows ports in this era.

But mainly, there was now a wealth of freeware and shareware games.

Windows 3.1

The technical differences between Windows 3.0 and 3.1 are not very great.
But the cultural differences, if I may use this term, were enormous.

Windows 3.1 had soundcard support by default ("Multimedia Windows").
Though it did not originally ship with generic SVGA drivers, these were soon offered as a free download.
If you had a VGA card with 512kB, not an uncommon thing in 1993, you could run Windows in 256 colors.
As a sidenote, 3.1 was the first version to sport the "Flying Window" logo, and the first one to include Minesweeper.

Here is a list of 16-color games from that era, and a list of 256-color games, which includes later games as well.

Windows 95

The release of Windows 95 did not immediately spell the end of 16-bit development, though the number of course decreased.
The reasons for the continued development were manyfold. For a while, of course, there was simply still a demand for such games.
Some programmers simply continued to use the old tools, like Visual Basic 3.0.
Visual Basic 4.0, released in August 1995, could still create both 32-bit and 16-bit executables.

Windows 98

When Windows 98 came out, 16-bit development was mostly dead.
Some tools like Klik & Play were still in use, which produced 16-bit programs, but developers may not even have been aware of this,
for they often gave Windows 95 under the minimum requirements or packed their game into a 32-bit installer.

Some of these late games perform or display better on 32-bit Windows. Pastel Fantasy is such an example.
On Windows 3.1, the fonts on the buttons look weird. "

Source: link

Edit: Formatting fixed (on PC).

keenmaster486 wrote on 2023-03-18, 02:14:

I like the Win31 GUI, but it's not for games.

I beg to differ. I spent countless hours playing Minesweeper in Win 3.1. 😉

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-03-18, 14:20:

I beg to differ. I spent countless hours playing Minesweeper in Win 3.1. 😉

Pretty much took me down a letter grade in a couple subjects one semester at college

OP said this is build is exclusively for Dos games therefore they should install 95. I have to assume the reason Windows is needed at all is for utility and file management, and 95 is about a million times better for that. With 95 you get USB, better networking with long file name support, more modern unzipping tools and robust file management out of the box.

DOS games never ran well for me under Windows 95. Always some slowdowns, VGA glitches or or other issues.
Real men use Real-Mode DOS without EMM386/MemMaker. They use their bare knuckles for memory management.

PS: GeoWorks Ensemble is a 1000 times more compatible as a GUI/games launcher/network tool, maybe.
It most notable runs entirely in Real-Mode only and can use EMS (doesn't steel XMS and conventional memory).

Edit: Breadbox Ensemble, a successor, can even imitate that hopeless, gray "concrete" look of Windows 95..

Edit: Screenshots added. There's also MOTIF as a an alternative style. Win 95 look is no must.

Edit: It's Open Source, too.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-pcge … urce-dos-shell/