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Is Windows 3.1 or Older Necessary?

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First post, by fsmith2003

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AS the title says. I was just wondering if you have a pre-Windows 95 era machine, are there any advantages to having Windows on there if all you want to do is play games? Were there any games that took advantage of anything Windows did at that point?

Reply 1 of 26, by leileilol

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No. There's no real advantage in Win3.1 gaming. Those that did were done with WinG which was pretty late in the Win3.1 life anyway (and border into the Win95 release schedule)

Probably the only reason to keep Win3.1 around is for those old icon-based novelty programs and some of the vanity shells....

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Reply 2 of 26, by Jade Falcon

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Their are alot of grate games for win3.1 and wile most if not all work in 9x. Have fun playing a win3x game on 9x with a low end 486 or 386 system.

Some games that come to mind are Lighthouse and Myst
Spiderweb games come in mind too.

And let not forget erar correct systems.

Reply 3 of 26, by BeginnerGuy

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fsmith2003 wrote:

AS the title says. I was just wondering if you have a pre-Windows 95 era machine, are there any advantages to having Windows on there if all you want to do is play games? Were there any games that took advantage of anything Windows did at that point?

I liked the version of Sim City I had on Windows 3.1 ... that's virtually all I can think of off of the top of my head. When I was a kid I almost never used windows 3.1 even though we had it. I used it a bit when AOL came around, but win95 hit the shelves not too long after that.

I did use it for a little while for a text editor I used to write C/C++ in, but I can't remember for the life of me what it was.. I've gone back to just using plain old turbo c++ in DOS though..

Sup. I like computers. Are you a computer?

Reply 4 of 26, by fsmith2003

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Jade Falcon wrote:
Their are alot of grate games for win3.1 and wile most if not all work in 9x. Have fun playing a win3x game on 9x with a low end […]
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Their are alot of grate games for win3.1 and wile most if not all work in 9x. Have fun playing a win3x game on 9x with a low end 486 or 386 system.

Some games that come to mind are Lighthouse and Myst
Spiderweb games come in mind too.

And let not forget erar correct systems.

When you say you played games for Win 3.1, do you mean DOS games that you happened to play on 3.1 or were there games that actually had some sort of advantage with or required Win 3.1 to run?

Reply 5 of 26, by fsmith2003

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leileilol wrote:

No. There's no real advantage in Win3.1 gaming. Those that did were done with WinG which was pretty late in the Win3.1 life anyway (and border into the Win95 release schedule)

Probably the only reason to keep Win3.1 around is for those old icon-based novelty programs and some of the vanity shells....

Looking at the Wikipedia page about WinG, it would appear the only games you would be looking to play pre-Win95 were The Lion King and SimTower that took advantage of this.

Reply 6 of 26, by Jade Falcon

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fsmith2003 wrote:
Jade Falcon wrote:
Their are alot of grate games for win3.1 and wile most if not all work in 9x. Have fun playing a win3x game on 9x with a low end […]
Show full quote

Their are alot of grate games for win3.1 and wile most if not all work in 9x. Have fun playing a win3x game on 9x with a low end 486 or 386 system.

Some games that come to mind are Lighthouse and Myst
Spiderweb games come in mind too.

And let not forget erar correct systems.

When you say you played games for Win 3.1, do you mean DOS games that you happened to play on 3.1 or were there games that actually had some sort of advantage with or required Win 3.1 to run?

I was referring to win3x games and not dos games under 3x.
There are tones of 3x games. But i never seen one that cant be played in 9x. Their is a handful of point a click adventure games for 3x that lack dos support.
Also one good game that lacks dos support is bad toys 3d. Most of the 3x only games are old shareware and not much is worth mentioning however.

Last edited by Jade Falcon on 2017-11-20, 04:45. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 7 of 26, by cyclone3d

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Pretty sure SimTower works in Windows 9x.

And yep, I was right.

From the Wiki:

"WinG out-of-the-box support (i.e. as a separate API to Win32) was dropped in Windows 98 Second Edition (which integrated DirectX 6), as it did absolutely nothing but pass through to the Win32 APIs that it was wrapping. WinG DLLs were sometimes distributed with an application, at which point it merely became a matter of copying the files wing.dll, wing32.dll, wingde.dll, wingdib.drv and wngpal.wnd to the system32 directory to regain system-wide support."

So absolutely 0 reason to have Windows before 9x for gaming.

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Reply 8 of 26, by fsmith2003

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Jade Falcon wrote:
fsmith2003 wrote:
Jade Falcon wrote:
Their are alot of grate games for win3.1 and wile most if not all work in 9x. Have fun playing a win3x game on 9x with a low end […]
Show full quote

Their are alot of grate games for win3.1 and wile most if not all work in 9x. Have fun playing a win3x game on 9x with a low end 486 or 386 system.

Some games that come to mind are Lighthouse and Myst
Spiderweb games come in mind too.

And let not forget erar correct systems.

When you say you played games for Win 3.1, do you mean DOS games that you happened to play on 3.1 or were there games that actually had some sort of advantage with or required Win 3.1 to run?

I was referring to win3x games and not dis games under 3x.
There are tones of 3x games. But i never seen ome that cant be played in 9x. Their is alot of point a click adventure games for 3x.

And these were not playable under DOS just Windows 3.x? I guess I wasn't aware there were actual Win 3.x exclusives. Any good list out there for the Windows 3.x games?

Reply 9 of 26, by Jade Falcon

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I never seen a list before.
I know there are quite a few win3x games out there that lack dos suport. But most at best are games like mico man and skifree. Most others aren't even worth mentioning. Anyway I have yet to find a game that runs in 3x that cant be ran in 9x.

I know lighthouse can be played in dos. But games like exile, mico man, skifree cant. Bad toys cant be played in dos if I recall to. Your best bet to find old win3x games is to get ahold of a old shareware disk for win3.1.

Reply 10 of 26, by firage

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There are a lot of games that visually blend nicely with Windows 3.1x. All those windowed games from the middle of the decade, even Civilization II, with their menu UI's.

Win9x's taskbar used to annoy the hell out of me.

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Reply 11 of 26, by Jo22

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cyclone3d wrote:

So absolutely 0 reason to have Windows before 9x for gaming.

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Reply 12 of 26, by jheronimus

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I like to have Win 3.11 on 486/early Pentium systems just to use Total Commander for my home FTP server. It's a lot more convenient than mTCP to me.

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Reply 15 of 26, by yawetaG

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firage wrote:

There are a lot of games that visually blend nicely with Windows 3.1x. All those windowed games from the middle of the decade, even Civilization II, with their menu UI's.

Win9x's taskbar used to annoy the hell out of me.

Win 3.x Program manager was still available as an alternate shell in Windows 9x.

Reply 16 of 26, by swaaye

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oeuvre wrote:

Everyone should just use Windows for Workgroups 3.11 daily.

I can't believe we once did. Or that the world once ran on Windows 9x. It's horrifying. 😀

Reply 17 of 26, by Auzner

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SimTower & SimAnt I remember playing in both 3.11 and 9x. Most of the PC games I did from Win 3.1 era were DOS based. I remember having most of the Microsoft Entertainment pack games in Win 3.1; Chip's Challenge, Ski Free, Rodent's Revenge, Tetris, Jezz Ball etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Entertainment_Pack Castle of the Winds was another.

Win 95/98 was always better and had pretty much no issues with "win 3.1 era" games. People who still used Win 3.1 over 95 probably had a 386/486 @ 25/33MHz instead of a DX2 or Pentium.

My memory on this is fuzzy, but the only game I can even think of that didn't run well in Win95 vs Win 3.1 was the CDROM Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. But I moved on to so many other games as a kid maybe that one just wasn't troubleshot enough.

Reply 18 of 26, by chrismeyer6

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I personally love windows 3.11 I have very fond memories as a kid of my dad bringing home our first computer. It was a custom built machine my dad was assigned from work. That thing was sweet AMD at 133 mhz, 32 megs of ram, 512k of L2 cache, 1 gig hard drive, 33.6 k modem for connecting to the server at work, a nice sound blaster with CD ROM drive, can't remember the video card but I'm pretty sure it was pci. I don't remember the mother board but I think it was PCI but could of been vlb I was young so I can't remember exactly. I wish we still had it but sadly it some how got lost to the sands of time.

Reply 19 of 26, by cyclone3d

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Jo22 wrote:
cyclone3d wrote:

So absolutely 0 reason to have Windows before 9x for gaming.

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Are there any real world applications that had those issues or just the cube demo?

I don't remember ever having issues with in Windows 9x running games that were meant for 3.1.

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