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Wait, they managed to get Wing Commander 3 working on Windows 95?? > Bonus chatter: During one of the many iterations of this story being retold, someone remar
by jbm 2y ago
Wait, they managed to get Wing Commander 3 working on Windows 95??
> Bonus chatter: During one of the many iterations of this story being retold, someone remarked that they got a copy of the video game Wing Commander III through this exercise. I immediately remembered that they fulfilled their expectation by filing a bug against Windows 95: When you earned the cloaking device on level 58 or something, you couldn’t activate it.
I never managed (not that it mattered, it took 10-15 minutes to load each mission even on DOS; I imagine it would have been worse under Windows 95).
- ido 2y agoWould it have been worse? I don’t recall dos games running any slower under windows 95 than under dos.
- toyg 2y agoI guess it depends on the hardware you had. On lower-spec machines, some games needed pretty much the entirety of one's RAM; Windows 95 obviously took some itself, so launching a game from it rather than booting to raw DOS would result in degraded performance.
- rickdeckard 2y agoOn the Hardware I had it was definitely worse to run a game from within Win95. Oh, the flashbacks of tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat to cram as close to 640KB RAM as possible just to execute a game... The "and here comes the HIMEM.SYS, here EMM386.EXE, then I need MSCDEX to get my CD-ROM...damn...okay, I don't really need the keyboard driver for this..."
- Propelloni 2y agoThank the gods for 4DOS https://wiki.preterhuman.net/4DOS_Introduction_and_Installation_Guide https://wiki.preterhuman.net/4DOS_Introduction_and_Installat...
- chungy 2y agoWindows 95's DOS virtual machines provided pretty close to a full 640KB of free conventional memory to each VM launched. You could even control how much they get through PIF settings (right click the shortcut, go to Properties). There was also no need to fiddle with, eg, mouse and CD-ROM drivers; the DOS VM outsourced the support of those devices to Windows, and did not occupy conventional memory in the way it would under MS-DOS itself. Unless you're booting into MS-DOS Mode, in which case, you're back to all the old awfulness.
- sumtechguy 2y agoWith that particular game it was a matter of memory. If you had 8MB or less free you were in for a BAD time. Ideally the thing really wants 16. So loading it inside of windows would be an interesting time as it uses its own chunk of memory off the top. Learned that years after I had finished the game. I had an 8MB machine and updated it to 16. Wing Commander 3 went from taking minutes to load each level to doing it in seconds.
- balls187 2y agoPC specs?
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoI remember playing (and finishing) it on a 166 MHz Win 95 machine.
- lb1lf 2y agoAs do I, on a 166MHz MMX with a whopping 64MB of RAM. First computer I bought with my own money, pored over computer magazines for weeks to figure out how to get the best bang for my buck. Ended up with a Matrox Millenium 4MB graphics card with a 3dfx Voodoo on top, if memory serves. The budget was maxed out to the extent that the owner of the shop I purchased all the parts at agreed to drive me the two miles back to the ferry home as I had no money for a taxi. Good times.
- mrguyorama 2y agoWhy so much RAM? My Windows 95 computer had 32mb of RAM and even that was overkill.
- lb1lf 2y agoIt dual-booted into W95 or NT4 when I tried to do serious work. MatLab could suck up memory like you wouldn't believe. Also, I think what made me pull the trigger was that RAM prices unexpectedly dropped by quite a lot just as I was about to buy, so I probably figured I might as well do a little future proofing.
- jbm 2y agoI was playing it on a 486 DX-2 66 Mhz, which probably is why I am having such a hard time believing it.