One thing to remember is that this dropped circa-2001. The dominant Windows versions were ME and XP. Both of which featured driver models of... not too much sy

One thing to remember is that this dropped circa-2001. The dominant Windows versions were ME and XP. Both of which featured driver models of... not too much system protection. So applications (especially games) looked a lot more like their console cousins, in that they took advantage of all kinds of weird hacks and did things 1,000 different ways. As opposed to now, when you have more strict intermediary layers, and software sits on top of more defined interfaces. So things like "the MechWarrior developer in charge of jump jets decided to base timing off the PCI bus speed" or god knows what, isn't that surprising.