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.
"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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 39.9 ms ] threadI couldn't understand the Swedish language here but I take it this can't be downloaded.
They have some PC Mag issues out there. Here is one from Jan 29, 1991: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_X_tru4xwJ_sC
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.
"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."
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?
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
That big stretching picture technique- they need to bring that back.
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.
X-COM, Doom 2, Warcraft, Colonization, Panzer General
And quite a few others.