I have wondered about this too. A lot of those games came in both DOS and Windows versions though. There was some discussion about it in this other thread where we were talking about the first game to mandate specific amounts of memory (such as 16MB or 32MB): Earliest games that used the most RAM?

On the contrary, it took poking and prodding from Microsoft to get game developers to treat Windows seriously, at first, since they regarded it as unnecessary bloat between the game and the hardware: http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321 … _bonus_ch02.pdf though obviously DirectX changed that.

One difficulty is if you had a brand new machine then, you might have a PCI sound card or AC'97 onboard sound, which might be not Sound Blaster compatible or requires a TSR, making DOS gaming more of a hassle. USB joysticks wouldn't work either, although before USB flash drives and especially before the iMac, USB (1.1) was an interesting curiosity duplicative of other ports and not used.

1996:
Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Succession Wars
Quake
WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal
Witchaven II: Blood Vengeance

1997:
Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Price of Loyalty

1999:
Tyrian 2000

Obviously, there were great games for DOS in that era - though gradually shifting towards expansions/remakes of earlier stuff, rather than something completely new.
Also, Internet access was still limited, the primary way for software distribution was physical media - which of course added certain inertia.

My gaming experience in that period was nearly 100% pure DOS - however my interest in gaming was already waning, so I didn't care about aquiring the latest stuff...

Was it unusual to play DOS games in the late 90s? The answer is no -- it was commonplace.
DOS and Windows games simply existed side by side (as did DOS and Windows themselves), since Windows 9x natively supports most DOS applications.
There were hundreds of popular DOS games. You think gamers just forgot about them the moment they installed a 3D accelerator?

Dos didn't die the day Win95 was released, it was a slow death.
Just as plenty of people are still using Windows 10, even though Windows 11 was released around 4 years ago.
Many people didn't upgrade from DOs/Win3x until the next upgrade.

In my case our school for example was still using Win3x when I graduated in '98 and while we upgraded our 486 to Win95, it was still limited to dos games until we finally upgraded in 1999.
My small circle of friends was in the same boat running the family 486 right upto 99/2000

You have to appeal to the majority of the market and in 1996 I guess it was about 50/50 which is why you get a fair few games released as both dos AND Win9x.
and even after the upgrade it wasn't uncommon to have a dos boot disk (until we worked out better ways) to play our back catalogue.
It was an easy job to take the ISA sound card from your old PC and put it in your "modern" one, if you even bothered, for the longest time I just used the dos driver for the onboard AudioPCI card, Back then I thought it was good enough for my old games.

There were (is) a number of DOS games I still play and enjoy from time to time (always been partial to the
original DOOM .. and a few others)

I still have several DOS systems, a couple of which are decent for games... and virtual machines/DosBox
do a remarkably good job of letting you run DOS (stuff) on modern non-DOS capable systems.

I think there were still good DOS games post Win95 .. Win95 and 98 ran on top of DOS, and most DOS
software (including many games) ran very well - and if it didn't. you could always reboot into DOS-only
mode...

I think the main issue with DOS stuff now is that most "modern" OSs don't have good (or any) DOS compatibility,
there is no DOS-only modes (and even if there were, there's no DOS drivers for new video/sound designs) ...
because of this there are virtually no new DOS games being produced.

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

Many games released in 1996 and 1997 had both DOS and Win95 versions. Often, these would ship on the same CD, so you could pick whichever one you wanted to install. In some cases (e.g. Master of Orion 2) the Win95 version was actually more buggy.

Also, people didn't automatically upgrade to Win95 when it came out. In fact, myself and most of my friends were happily using DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 until mid 1997. Certain hardware had poorly written drivers for Win95, so sometimes it was just easier to stay with DOS.

96 is more or less the border.

It was a soft border until directx abstracted away a lot of the work addressing hardware individually.

Mechwarrior 2 is a great example of a game that straddled the border.
There were approximately 40 different releases (of the 3 games) that addressed different hardware and culminated in the directx release.

myne wrote on 2025-01-23, 06:15:

96 is more or less the border.

More like 1997.

See the stats from Mobygames:
1996 - 687 titles for DOS, 626 for Windows
1997 - 422 for DOS, 929 for Windows

Also, 1997 was when Quake II got released - I think the first case when the best-selling game was Windows-only.

And, of course, keep in mind the inertia of "installed base" - I'm pretty sure that in 1997, I still associated Windows gaming with Minesweeper and Solitaire...

687 vs 626

That looks even enough for me to call it a border.

Though maybe border isn't the greatest word.

Transition point?

i understand the question differently than what most answers here suggest - it seems to be not about when games stopped being made for DOS, but how long the average user cared to play DOS games...

i would say the XP launch was the turning point, because while you could still install your old DOS games, they might have no sound, run slow, crash etc, so then you either had to reinstall old win98 or spend time looking for solutions on the internet. same applies to win2000, it just wasn't considered a mainstream OS like XP was.

also around that time windows source ports of some popular DOS games started to appear, leading many to abandon the original versions. zdoom and such probably had many believe that the original maps are supposed to be played with freelook and jumping...

"Turning point" is a good term here.
Because, even after Windows XP was out projects like VDMSound were sought after.
My friends in school still told everyone about how aewsome VDMSound is, when I had moved to DOSBox.

Also notable is that Windows XP had been used as drop-in replacement for Windows 9x (Windows 98SE).
People were so amazed to finally being able to work with a real OS first time!

The same amazement that OS/2 users had felt in early 90s when they *finally* had a real operating system at hand that didn't stall every time.

And no, Windows NT4 and 2000 were no alternatives.
Not to mortals, at least. Windows 2000 was a fine OS, but compatibility to Windows 9x wasn't that great yet.

What's also notable, NTVDM in Windows XP had gotten support for SB 2.0 emulation.
That wasn't much, but had increased compatibility a bit.
VDMSound with its SB16 emulation was much more fun.

For me personally it was 1997. Then my family got a spanking new Compaq with 166mhz MMX CPU. All the DOS games then just felt old and outdated. More cumbersome to install and run. Win95 was the way to go.

DOS games generally stopped releasing commercially after PCI sound cards became a thing hitting hard in mid-1998. Most of them would only have some rudimentary sound blaster compatibility (if any). The later DOS games tended to be from Bethesda. Also the 3D graphics boom didn't care about DOS either (3dfx, S3, MSI and PowerVR are fringe early 95-97 stuff) I think it's fair to say that's when it fell off.

Yes, but there was another reason for this, too:
By late 90s, software developers had assumed that Windows 9x was available to all users.
And on Windows 9x it was possible to provide virtual Sound Blaster compatibility via VXDs.

So it was assumed that hardware-compatibility was nolonger needed, anyway, because users rarely had used real DOS anymore.
Speaking of, the last DOS was MS-DOS 6.22 from 1994 - released almost half a decade before Windows 98.

Sure there were other DOS like IBM DOS, Novell DOS/Caldera DOS, PTS DOS etc or OS/2 Warp 4.
But as far as the mainstream was concerned, last DOS was MS-DOS 6.22.

auron wrote on 2025-01-23, 08:22:

i would say the XP launch was the turning point

Yes, and about the same time there came the Pentium 4 = no ISA = neverending problems with sound in DOS.

When the default hardware ceased to support DOS, and the default OS wasn't DOS-based anymore, DOS games also got reduced into a tiny niche... a.k.a. VOGONS 🤣

Gratefully, there's ArcaOS. It runs better on UEFI than it did on BIOS, I read.
It would be funny if OS/2 might outlive Windows NT in the end,
considering that current Windows moves to Linux more and more.

Grzyb wrote on 2025-01-23, 03:19:

1996: Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Succession Wars Quake WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal Witchaven II: Blood Vengeance […]
Show full quote

1996:
Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Succession Wars
Quake
WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal
Witchaven II: Blood Vengeance

1997:
Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Price of Loyalty

1999:
Tyrian 2000

Obviously, there were great games for DOS in that era - though gradually shifting towards expansions/remakes of earlier stuff, rather than something completely new.
Also, Internet access was still limited, the primary way for software distribution was physical media - which of course added certain inertia.

My gaming experience in that period was nearly 100% pure DOS - however my interest in gaming was already waning, so I didn't care about aquiring the latest stuff...

Great titles, HoMM III could've been a DOS game if Microsoft didn't succeed in their gaming on Windows plans.
Also II was available for Windows too. Using WinG I believe.

To answer OP, genres are a thing, and me playing og Unreal Tournament in awe in 00-01 doesn't mean I wanted to drop everything else. Some people are like that, they play the latest regardless of genre, myself no. There were no better shooters than Tyrian, there were no better platformers than Apogee titles, so on...

You can also ask what is the lifespan of SNES or Playstation games, and in some cases, it is very, very long. Super Metroid and Symphony of The Night did not have a successor for a long time. The Super Metroid ROM hacking community thrived while there were least efforts to make a proper Metroidvania. When both Nintendo and Indie community started rolling out titles in this sub-genre, the reliance on 90s titles and hacking new things into them took a back seat.

Heroes of Might and Magic 3, same thing. There is absolutely no replacement for this game. A lot of people still play it, play it online, tons of mods and enhancements and community development, but the base is always original Windows 95 compatible code.

There were Pentium 4 boards with ISA slots, some even supported up to Core2 chips. And MSI even created an IvyBridge motherboard with an ISA slot for industrial use. But XP supported DOS gaming, even if there weren't ISA slots.

There were even games like Elder Scroll Redguard which had a Windows based installer, but the game itself was a pure DOS game. I even remember the Voodoo version of MechWarrior 2 bundled with my Monster 3D having a Windows UI, but launching into missions fired up a DOS window to actually play.

ISA slots don't mean it can fully support ISA soundcards because a lot of P4 ISA bridge chips do not work well with DMA.
The industrial use is different because the controllers run PIO.

I've recently done a build very fast DOS 3D gaming (software), to achieve 100+ FPS in hi-res that I can 'vsync' to my CRT, I really did not want to go for i845, but for 3+ GHz on 865, and to get ISA there was not available, no boards on ebay/ali, so on. A second hand northwood board costs as much or more as second hand prescott board because the former has ISA and that carries 'weight' in today's retro market, seller of course never plugged a SB in it to check does it really work. An ESS Solo PCI card does DOS basics enough. It does decent FM and has wavetable, so something like Descent 2 with good module would still qualify as great sound. I'm not so sure why put an accent to a single ISA slot unless you would really really like to mix something like GUS with a 'modern' platform...

And yeah I also remember a bunch of games having a windows setup, groups/icons, but launching a DOS game.