Rendering like it's 1996 – Bitmap fonts and DOS | Hacker News Reader

Rendering like it's 1996 – Bitmap fonts and DOS

marioslab.io

98 points_Microft10 comments

Adobe Type Manager was also made available for a select few PC operating systems available during the early 1990s, including NeXTSTEP, DESQview, and OS/2. Unlike the Windows and Mac versions, these versions of ATM were bundled with the OS itself.

-- wikipedia

Like 1996? I was on NeXT, with a Mac ripserver of all things publishing 24-7, and it hardly looked bitmappy.

It does say “DOS” in the title. I think most people don’t think of NeXT or Mac when they read “DOS”

DOS was well on its way out (and probably a minority already) on PCs in 1996. It was all about Windows 95 at that point.

I get the author's intention of "like it's $DAYSGONEBY", but 1996 is a rather odd choice when it doesn't reflect the norm for the year.

Both Quake and Duke Nukem 3D came out targeting DOS in 1996. Windows development took a while to take off if I remember correctly since DOS apps could run on Windows too so developers had less incentive to switch over at the time

not really.

MS-DOS 6.22, the last version of MS-DOS, was released not long before in 1994

Tomb Raider

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

Descent II

Quake

Duke Nukem 3D

all came out in 1996 and no Windows 95 native version was available

To get more developers on board DirectX, Microsoft approached id Software's John Carmack and offered to port Doom and Doom 2 from MS-DOS to DirectX, free of charge, with id retaining all publishing rights to the game. Carmack agreed, and Microsoft's Gabe Newell led the porting project. The first game was released as Doom 95 in August 1996, the first published DirectX game. Microsoft promoted the game heavily with Bill Gates appearing in ads for the title.

We can almost say that 1996 was the pinnacle of "rendering in DOS"

Windows 95 was still DOS-based and DirectX was just beginning to take off; many of the most popular games of that era ran on DOS.

(I remember that the best way to run the original release of Warcraft II was to set its shortcut to "DOS mode," where Windows would exit to DOS, run the game, and then restart Windows once the game exited)

There is a lot of magic and hard-core engineering work on Microsoft's part to that.

Windows/386 is an hypervisor that runs the Windows as one of the VMs, original DOS as another and can create additional DOS VMs. Windows 3.1 then added the capability of this hypervisor to run some limited kinds of native i386 Windows NT applications on their own VMs that can do inter-VM IPC. Windows 95 extended this architecture to the extreme, there was no “Windows in a VM”, Windows was the OS, that ran Win32 API processes directly, traditional 16bit applications also mostly directly and mainly: it managed bunch VM86 VMs. Prime VM of these ran the original DOS with all of its drivers, which was then used for hardware that did not have native Windows drivers. Another VMs contained the DOS software that you ran. The whole thing was somehow capable of translating the API calls from not only 3 different client ABIs, but also to 3 different driver ABIs…

The author explains their personal connection to 1996 in the first post:

https://marioslab.io/posts/rendering-like-its-1996/babys-fir...

I was also primarily playing DOS games and writing DOS programs at the time, so this rings true for me. Everyone has different experiences.

Something else from the demoscene guy who designed that last font used in the article: https://vimeo.com/62244338

Quite an endearing little film.

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