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.

Pope was a QA engineer - that means he worked on systems that weren't qualified for shipping. Actual CMS bugs in a shipped device was extremely rare, but the big promise of Transmeta was that would _could_ ship fixes (and did, in at least one case). The perf impact of a CMS fix was typically trivial as it was fixing a translator, unlike an interpreter like the microcode in an Intel core.