Speedy - nice benchmark, looking at readme and executable it only tests GDI, the old slow way of doing graphics.
What were the main uses for fast 2D GUI acceleration back in the win3 days?
Win3 problem was GDI with no direct access to video memory, no double buffering, no concept of Vsync. Yes, even GDI accelerators flickered. You created graphic objects in ram and windows copied that around = slow.
WinG created very late in 1994 so irrelevant for win3 https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/video-faq/54-What-is-DCI.html
"Among DCI's capabilities are the ability to write directly to the frame buffer" - this allowed WinDoom at glorious 12 fps 😜 https://doomwiki.org/wiki/WinDoom_(Microsoft)
Alex St John: "Robert Hess worked very hard to make WinDoom work as well as it did. At 12fps John Carmack considered the video tearing in Windows to be unacceptable and we couldn't synchronize the sound with the video to save our lives!"
Alex St John: "WinG was just the CreateDiBSection API in Windows95 so it wasn't dead in that respect. The WinDoom port just made it 100% clear why Windows sucked for games."
That clears WinG as unusable for action games. Win95 I understand as games started actually using directdraw, but even then one of the first if not the first directdraw game was Doom95 port by Microsoft (second try) and that didnt use any acceleration 😀 only direct access to video framebuffer.
Alex St John: "The very first thing we did in DirectX 1.0 is wrap the undocumented KillGDI API to enable Doom95 to play in a 320x200 VESA mode with vertical blank syncronization as Carmack intended. I hired John Miles to create the prototype for DirectSound which solved the audio sync problems"
Supposedly win3 release of SimCity 2000 (the one with use after free memory bug hehe) uses WinG. Would be interesting to test how much difference a fast accelerator card does on a slow CPU in this game.
Then win95/NT had high end high resolution workstation software ported from Unix workstations so you needed that fast 2D subsystem.
Why else would one want accelerated graphics in win3?
DTP? something like Xerox Ventura Publisher was released in parallel for DOS/GEM and worked fine with no acceleration there. QuarkXPress? most ran on Mac. Aldus Pagemaker came bundled with windows 2.0 so definitely ran fine with no acceleration.
Video was a dumpster fire on Windows compared to Apple. Microsoft together with Intel conspired paying Apple contractor to steal QuickTime code for Video for Windows! https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/micros … aid_apple_150m/
"David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million."
"Microsoft and Intel had been shocked to find that Apple's QuickTime product made digital video on Windows seem like continuous motion, and was far in advance of anything that either of them had, even in a planning stage. The speed was achieved by bypassing Windows' Graphics Display Interface and enabling the application to write directly to the video card. The result was a significant improvement over the choppy, 'slide-show' quality of Microsoft's own efforts. Apple's intention was to establish the driver as a standard for multimedia video imaging, so that Mac developers could sell their applications on the Windows and Mac platforms. Microsoft requested a free licence from Apple for QuickTime for Windows in June 1993, and was refused. In July 1993, the San Francisco Canyon Company entered into an agreement with Intel to deliver a program (codenamed Mario) that would enable Intel to accelerate Video for Windows' processing of video images. However, although Intel certainly knew that Canyon had developed key parts of the code for Apple, it did not specify that this must be undertaken in a clean room,"
"Intel gave this code to Microsoft as part of a joint development program called Display Control Interface."
"Canyon admitted that it had copied to Intel code developed for and assigned to Apple. In September 1994, Apple's software was distributed by Microsoft in its developer kits, and in Microsoft's Video for Windows version 1.1d."
Looks like that stolen Apple Quicktime code landed in late 1994 as part of WinG DCI, still too late for win3 and more about Win95.
Interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20091006022255/ht … res/alexstjohn/
FS: What was Microsoft's philosophy or attitude regarding games when you began?
Alex St John: Oh, it was completely nonexistent! During that time, their entire focus was on multimedia video, the primary mission of DirectX wasn't to benefit and push gaming, but simply to drive Apple and Quicktime into the ground.
😮
CAD? no way on crashy dos based 16 bit co-operative multitasking with no memory protection/isolation win3. If anything CAD started showing up on NT.
I sincerely want to know who was the target audience of 2D acceleration on 16bit windows. Serious people used unix workstations (sgi, apollo/hp, sun, sony) or Macs. Games either didnt need it, or needed it badly but couldnt be made to work.
