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
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