More than 30 years later, you can still run winquake.exe on Windows 11. Fullscreen does not support widescreen but the windowed mode still works flawlessly. As much as Microsoft has been questionable lately, their commitment to backward compatibility is impressive.
I love this about Windows so much it's hard to explain to somebody who doesn't understand why it matters. :-)
This is a great write-up for those of us that were into Quake when it was released. Trying to tune your performance was a huge undertaking during the days where you tried running Quake while also having Windows 95. I got into Quake because of all the available MAP tools you could use with it, and the multiplayer aspect, which previously had been very difficult to get working without a LAN.
The detail that -wavonly (falling back to the older WinMM API instead of DirectSound) actually gave the highest frame rate is a perfect example of a lesson that keeps reappearing in systems programming: "more direct" doesn't always mean faster when you're CPU-bound. DirectSound's lower latency came at the cost of more CPU cycles that could otherwise go to rendering.
That's some of the same stuff that SDL is meant to abstract over, right? Although I guess SDL was more targeting Windows / Linux differences than Windows / Windows differences.
Also Linux/Linux differences – Xlib, SVGAlib, DirectFB, DRI, GGI, DGA and who knows how many other ways to draw stuff on the screen existed for Linux back then.
This is a great write-up for those of us that were into Quake when it was released. Trying to tune your performance was a huge undertaking during the days where you tried running Quake while also having Windows 95. I got into Quake because of all the available MAP tools you could use with it, and the multiplayer aspect, which previously had been very difficult to get working without a LAN.
The detail that -wavonly (falling back to the older WinMM API instead of DirectSound) actually gave the highest frame rate is a perfect example of a lesson that keeps reappearing in systems programming: "more direct" doesn't always mean faster when you're CPU-bound. DirectSound's lower latency came at the cost of more CPU cycles that could otherwise go to rendering.
That's some of the same stuff that SDL is meant to abstract over, right? Although I guess SDL was more targeting Windows / Linux differences than Windows / Windows differences.
Also Linux/Linux differences – Xlib, SVGAlib, DirectFB, DRI, GGI, DGA and who knows how many other ways to draw stuff on the screen existed for Linux back then.
Yeah, also SDL didn't exist until a year after WinQuake's release.