Windows 3.1 was a system hog when it came to resources and many DOS games did not work with it or performed very poorly on it. Windows 3.1 did advertise that it could it could multitask with DOS programs, but the results were rather mixed. Some games even had "Boss Keys" which were intended to fool your supervisor if you happened to be playing a game at work. In order to start another program, you had to quit your game. DOS games relied on unfettered access to hardware, especially RAM, the video adapter and the system timers. Multitasking and DOS gaming were grudging companions at best. For the first time users could easily access more than one program on a PC through the task switcher because the operating system was built for multitasking. Most control was accomplished using a mouse. Unlike the text command line parser of DOS, Windows was a graphical operating system with nary a command prompt in sight.
Windows 3.1 main draw was its support for multimedia, essentially sound cards, MIDI devices and CD-ROM audio. (Windows 3.00a with Multimedia Extensions was available from OEMs). This was the first version of Windows that Microsoft really designed for gaming applications and was available to purchase at retail. Microsoft Windows released Windows 3.1 on April 6, 1992.
0 kommentar(er)
