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There was a big new overhead -- in DOS you could write directly to video memory, and control the graphics cards registers directly. In windows you had to go thr
by CJefferson 10y ago
There was a big new overhead -- in DOS you could write directly to video memory, and control the graphics cards registers directly. In windows you had to go through libraries. Until DirectX came along, it was basically impossible to write even reasonable performance animations in windows, hence the lack of games in windows 2 and 3.
- pjmlp 10y agoThat is not true, before DirectX there was WinG and there were quite a few good games done in WinG. The lack of games was mostly due to reluctance of game developers to abandon Assembly and using directly PC hardware, specially because C and C++ compilers were "too slow".
- kayamon 10y agoWinG didn't come around until 1994 though. If you wanted to ship a game in 1990, you had a choice of using GDI or using MS-DOS. And the "assembly" argument doesn't make any sense. You can program Windows games in assembly if you want.
- pjmlp 10y agoWindows only became relevant for home users after version 3.0, actually the 3.1, which was released in 1992, so of course no one was shipping Windows games in 1990! Sure you can use Assembly on Windows and there were a few books teaching exactly that, but you weren't allowed to touch the graphics hardware any more, unless you were doing a graphics driver, and do all those graphic card tricks, specially mode X.