Real Games for Windows (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Real Games for Windows (1994)

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33 pointsdosshell14 comments

Funny thing is I was just looking up info on WinG. It basically provided the same as X's shared-memory pixmap extension: here's an in-memory framebuffer which you can also get as an HBITMAP and fast-blit to the screen without having to round-trip the whole image between CPU and video memory. The emergence of what Amigaheads call "chunky graphics" (all pixel components in memory sequentially) as a default in SVGA hardware is really what enabled this development; DIBs were chunky but on EGA or 16-color VGA the underlying hardware could be planar, necessitating the slow conversion of a DIB into a video-card-friendly format before it could be blitted.

Basic sprite graphics were possible -- and even fast -- on Win16 before WinG if you stored your sprites as HBITMAPs and blitted them with a mask to a back-buffer bitmap, then used double buffering to render this to the display. I created a demo of Mario running around in a window to the amusement of my high school friends in this way.

Oh my God, WinG. That lasted for what - a year? I think I was using it seriously at one point. Part of the ultimate quest for a generic graphics library (suitable for gaming, or whatever).

Good ol' WinG. Did it even gain any traction before DirectX took over?

More than anything that article reminds me how great PC Magazine was. They had technical articles written by guys like Neil Rubenking, Charles Petzold, and Jeffrey Richter.

Heh, no. WinG was a disaster. It took years before game developers trusted Windows again. From http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/01/04/the-disnesy-disaster...

"Disney had done a deal with Compaq Computers to ship the Lion King Game pre-installed on a million Compaq Computers destined as Christmas presents for children everywhere across the country. The NEW Presario line had a NEW Cirrus video chip and NEW Cirrus video driver never before tested with WinG."

I'm no fan of 90's-era Microsoft, but, come on, that wasn't fair.

Disney (not MS) did a deal with Compaq (not MS) to ship a game (not written by MS) on a PC with a Cirrus (not MS) graphics card whose driver (not written by MS) was apparently never tested.

And somehow, this was Microsoft's fault?

I didn't say that it was Microsoft's fault. But the message that game devs got was that you couldn't trust even big names such as Compaq to ship working drivers, and hence you couldn't trust Windows as a platform.

Sierra shipped games (e.g. Kings Quest 7) in the late Win 3.1 era that required WinG.

Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft

http://amzn.com/dp/0609604163

TL;DR: the history of WinG and DirectX

The Wikipedia entry is also worth checking out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG

If you find this kind of stuff interesting, GDC Vault hosts back issues of Game Developer back to 1994: http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag

I'd prefer to download a PDF of PC Mag - this is so full of nostalgia.

I couldn't understand the Swedish language here but I take it this can't be downloaded.

You can find a lot of old game/pc/dev magazines on archive.org, downloadable in many formats (including epub and PDF).

They have some PC Mag issues out there. Here is one from Jan 29, 1991: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_X_tru4xwJ_sC

Interesting that page 29 has an article saying flexible displays may be just around the corner. And all the laptops cost $7500, and a digital camera was $10,995.

BTW, 1994 saw the release of some of the greatest classics in PC gaming:

X-COM, Doom 2, Warcraft, Colonization, Panzer General

And quite a few others.

The Personal NetWare ad is just classic.

That big stretching picture technique- they need to bring that back.

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