Ugh. I had Mechwarrior 2 back in the day, and could never figure out how to get it running.

I also remember reading contemporary computer guides and being warned against using compression utilities in most cases; some going so far to even ward against zipping utilities. Gunmetal was a fun one too, since it seemed to be one of the earliest games to use DirectX...at detriment; as I think the entire thing falls apart with any version later than 5 or something.

Me too. "Web 2.0" has brainwashed people into thinking change is necessary in all instances, that new is always better, and to shout down anyone who questions these precepts.

And some people have been brainwashed into thinking that all change is bad [rolls eyes]

Stop it with the sheep fallacy - there's no brainwashing going on.

Some of us (for reasons that have been clearly laid out) prefer the enhancements made to Windows 10 in Windows 11. Other people seem to prefer to have pretty much the same operating system less some quality of life features and essentially a half-yearly update behind on the core OS with a slightly different start menu.

As I've said, this happens every time Microsoft release a new version of Windows. I'll be back for the next round when 12 comes out and everyone says how much better 11 was and how much we're all brainwashed sheep for enjoying the new features.

I rest my case :p

For me the fact that Windows 10 support is ending in two years or so was good enough reason to switch to Windows 10.

Also specifically for my work laptop, I guess the optional extra security features are a good thing, like that some sandboxing thingie I enabled in the Windows 11 options. No idea though if it would affect gaming as I don't do gaming on that installation. It feels a bit like whether one should enable or disable SELinux or AppArmor in Linux for extra security, or not.

The early Windows 95 games were DOS games running from Windows and of course some of the power was lost to the background tasks of the UI and service based operating system.
With direct access to everything something can obviously also be optimized better. Once you have a UI and try to run a game inside that UI, we have to start talking about Overlay mechanisms, which was no topic when there was only one UI to begin with.

Btw, disc compression existed alreaedy for DOS several years before, there were several competitors, DoubleSpace ended up to be used for DOS. Later, Microsoft fixed some bugs and renamed it for use in Windows 95
https://youtu.be/oa3xp1xNwvM?t=471

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I prefer older 100k web pages that worked over having to download 30Mb of other crap to view basically what is static today.


That's what i figured which is why i'd have to leave windows to run dos games faster in those cases.

Yep, good video. I actually liked Stakker since my dad had it, but it wasn't supported as well. And disc compression was supported better with the Win95 companion disc which included tools to scan compressed portions and compress them with a better algorithm (or just better job).

Regardless it's not native to windows (or the filesystem anyways, before NTFS) and requires use of a virtual mounted volumes to do the transparent compression. Which... worked... until something went wrong. I ended up never trusting it, not even really for disks. I mean it would have worked quite well if COW was offered and you could make a master filesystem readonly for say the base OS and things.

Which kinda makes it funny that disk compression being pushed, many programs and games use their own compressed archives (even using zip files) for their main package of files. Or in the case of games, most ran off the disc with very little to copy to the local machine.

When I think on how we constantly were close to losing all of our data and even closer to having corrupted data without noticing it, I can't help but wonder why people keep thinking that back in the days everything was better.
Back then it was absolutely necessary to perform regular disk checks and - until they fixed the bugs - run integrity checkers once in a while. At some point it was automated by the OS and by now no one gives a sh**. Also it's quite impossible to find incompatible hardware these days. But a SB16 would not run on a TC4 chipset board and a wrong network card in a Compaq computer crashed the complete company network, bringing all production machines to a halt repeatedly until the problem was found. This cost a lot of money.
When I did my MCP for M- SQL administration, it was still important to know how large the cluster size on the hard drive had to be :) ... Good times.
The problems we face to day are new ones, but that does not mean that we had less problems back in the days.

Disk compression was not something for games or so, it would help save space when working with texts ot tables.
Also image compression was not all too common back then.

It was of course not much more than a balloon full of hot air, shortly after the introduction of W95 hard disks began to grow rapidly. But for a limited time it was a good money maker.

Considering after you install several programs that replace DLL's and make the OS unstable. It was quite a problem.

Though i'm not sure how close we were to losing data, it might have been better then. I'm talking about backups. CD burners were coming out, and it was pushed a lot more to do backups, regularly with disks or burned CD's. My dad said he'd get a pack of like 50 CD's for $20, then do a backup every week, that's 700Mb of data whole or incremental and at most you lost a week's worth of data.

Also unless the file structure was corrupted, corruption would be limited to individual sectors/files. Which it still is, just it's better supported now.

And with all OSes pushing journalism Filesystem sudden restarts won't leave all your data out of commission for hours while there's checks and fixes (and occasional lost and found files)

Pretty sure they had the suggested weekly checks, usually sunday or wednesday night... assuming you weren't one to turn your computer off.

Heh which is funny. Just remembering about screensavers and it was actually common to just leave your computer on and let it screensave for hours at a time. Anymore i tend to put my computer to sleep unless i'm at it; Though if i have a LOT of jobs i will have a computer work on it 24/7 for a few weeks depending on things.

I think under the hood, everything is a soundblaster pro, as that's how i always treated everything since 1998, everything seemed to work with those drivers. Add a few features/do-hickies and make a driver to access those in the event they are actually needed.

Knowing the sector size is still good. Though getting past FAT16 and Filesystems that let you have small sectors plus tons of inodes certainly helped. FAT16/FAT12 was pretty much a minimal filesystem, and it had to be, you were working with like 10Mb disks originally and you couldn't waste space. Which is a major reason you had the 8.3 filenames (8 bytes long, 3 byte extension) and only a handful of flags. And if you look at how FAT was set up, the allocation table the file only points to the first sector, while the allocation table had 0 (unused) max/-1 for end of sector, and every other number pointing to other sectors so the length was variable. Quite a system. Windows 95 started using multiple entries in the folder sectors to make longer filenames, a workaround where you'd get SomeFi~1.txt or something for longer filenames still compatible with older programs.

Images on the other hand... you had gif, and you had bmp if i remember right. PNG came later with patent issues on the gif LZ77 sliding window (which is long since expired). But after Win95 Jpeg was becoming common to be used; Though i still occationally get 30Mb BMP files emailed to me that i recompress to 700k and send back.

Though at the time you were usually doing 16 or 256 colors. So the size wasn't THAT bad.

Downside of Jpeg though is artifacting as default compression is like 70% quality. That's fine and dandy, unless you're an artist like my ex, and she'd have to go 'fix' all the artifacts when she was working on it again. I told her to save it as PNG and poof, problem went away :P

I think introducing iso's you could make on the local computers with high compression would have done better. Then you take stuff you want to do for a backup, compress it, and if you need it mount as a read-only drive. If they did that then i am sure the base OS would have been that way too, making it impervious to viruses. Or at least, make installation of the OS like 4 minutes because it's 2 massive files to copy (base OS, extra drivers/tools).

Once CD burners were a thing, but data existed before :) Not many people did have tape drives - and later not the money to afford so many empty CDs. Now I am using a RDX drive for my most important data that I can't recreate.
I was referring mostly to the disk compression, which was huge risk in the beginning. I believe that a lot of data loss during that time was caused by that.

I remember using MS-DOS 5 or 6, and it included a basic backup program. You selected the folders you wanted, and it archived to floppy disks. (Back in a time when 100Mb hard drives was a thing...)

But yes, a big risk in losing data. I remember losing my data twice when i was a teenager. Mostly fanfic stories (of dubious quality)

The toted 'double your hard drive space for $20 with this tool' but not the risks involved or good tools for fixing errors as they were detected...

Had error correction been a larger part of filesystems or drives in the past, i'm sure a lot less data would have been lost. That or everyone go the linux route and use gzip for everything and tools that supported reading it :P (least then it would be per-file rather than potentially the entire volume)