

Real Games for Windows (1994) - dosshell
https://books.google.se/books?id=PITtFPwTaWwC&lpg=PP1&hl=sv&pg=RA1-PA357#v=onepage&q&f=false

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bitwize
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.

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Tekker
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).

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bluedino
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.

~~~
pdw
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...](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."

~~~
ryandrake
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?

~~~
pdw
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.

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

[http://amzn.com/dp/0609604163](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG)

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

~~~
sqldba
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.

~~~
ccurrens
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](https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_X_tru4xwJ_sC)

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flurpitude
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.

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admbk
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.

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lighthawk
The Personal NetWare ad is just classic.

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

