Windows 95 contained a workaround for a SimCity 2000 memory bug | Hacker News Reader

Windows 95 contained a workaround for a SimCity 2000 memory bug

maketecheasier.com

10 pointscgeier10 comments

Raymond Chen of Microsoft explained why they go through the effort of coding a lot of special-case compatibility shims for other's misbehaving apps. It's to remove obstacles that prevent customers from upgrading Windows.

(The urls from microsoft.com load very slowly for some reason so may have to use Wayback Machine instead.)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050824-11/?p=34...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031224-00/?p=41...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190315130516/https://devblogs....

https://web.archive.org/web/20190315121601/https://devblogs....

> Produced with AI assistance. Reviewed by the Make Tech Easier editorial team before publication.

I realized this during reading and it's nice of them to confirm it. It's weird to read all those LLM tells while also feeling the text is coherent and makes sense.

just look at that giant 8-line headline, insanity

It's 15 lines long on my smartphone screen. :-D

Still painfully sloppified and hard to read. They must have let it terraform the entire text without setting any expectations. Em-dashes for emphasis and punchy short sentences abound. Terrible.

Sorry for the heavy editorialising of the title, but it was really much too long.

As a reminder, it was far more difficult to "ship an update" for games in 1995. The web was just getting started. Games showed up on CDs, often bought off shelves, in actual stores.

I always think about how relatively bug-free older games like GTA San Andreas are, since if they ship with some game breaking bug it's pretty much permanent. You could say this about software in general, but with games, especially non-linear ones I'd imagine there'd be more edge cases involved (I've never developed a full game myself, so I can only speculate).

In paper mario 64 (20001), there was a game breaking bug where I got enough star points (or whatever they're called) and got the prompt asking me to level up. But I was already levelled up to the max, and the game wouldn't let me proceed without levelling up. I couldn't roll back to the previous save game because every time I beat the boss I'd get enough points asking me to level up again and I'd be stuck. These days a simple patch would do the trick.

I can't imagine a game like Cyberpunk 2077 coming out in 2004 in the state that it did.

You can do months of testing which obviously costs money AND delays your game. Or you can ship it and patch later. Make your customers be the beta testers.

Now I personally wait at least 6 months because I can't fucking STAND broken games. However the market has spoken: gamers at large don't give a shit.

Unless you are so enraptured by the idea of the game that you cannot live without it, or if you are a streamer who will make money from playing the game on day 1, waiting 6 months for patches is the play.

You will typically save money on the game, other people will review it, flaws will be fixed, and you'll have a better time of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com