>>Quite on the contrary. DOS games always had and have flakey sound and
>>multibutton controller support (only supporting some sound cards and
>>controllers, and not using the extra features in them), no cheap/free
>What? Eh? DOS controller support has been _much_ less problematic than
>Win95
Give me a break. Your multibutton flightstick/whatever has to be
_directly_ supported by _each_ DOS game. Usually CH Flightstick Pro and
Thrustmaster, all the others pretty much had to be hardware compatible
with these two to get multibutton support.
In Win95, as long as a game says it supports rudder, throttle, hat and
eight buttons, I know I'm getting support for them for my stick even if
it isn't hardware compatible with any older flightstick.
No issues? How come I couldn't get my Gravis Ultrasound to work in
Tomb Raider and Descent 2, even thought those games even claimed to
support that sound card? Why did I have to change the IRQ from 11
(default) to 5 for my sound card just for Apogee DOS games and Doom,
which for some reason required the sound card IRQ may not be over 9 or
something like that? How come my friend's "SB Pro compatible" sound
card didn't work properly in "Alone in the Dark" and lots of
other games?
In Win95, once you get your sound card working once, it pretty much
works always after that without having to reconfigure it for each game,
like when you install DOS games.
Last update to DOS was DOS 7.0 or 7.1, actually. Not DOS 6.22.
Sorry but it isn't just so. Here's the basic difference with Windows
and DOS: DOS doesn't have any "universal" APIs whatsoever, like for
sound cards, *** controllers, 3D cards etc., simply because it
doesn't use shared libraries. The support (API) for all those stuff has
to come in EACH DOS game separately, and unfortunately different DOS
games use various different APIs, so you never know beforehand whether
your hardware is supported in the DOS game you are going to buy.
And practically never can you get advanced support for your NEWER
hardware in your older DOS games, like you can with Win95 games.
In fact unless your new hardware is backwards compatible in hardware
level with the older "standard", you won't get any support in your
older DOS games.
In Win95, as long as you know you have working DirectSound drivers for
your sound card, working DirectInput drivers for your *** controller
etc., you are all set for all games.
That is what most gamers and *** programmers thought.
How do you know? DOS Quake did get several updates after its release.
"But I didn't expect you to mention that since it refutes what you are
trying to say.". And WinQuake was faster than DOS Quake from the start.
Ever saw these "why is my sound card not supported by this game?",
"why doesn't my joystick calibrate correctly in Nascar?", "what kind of
memory does this game require?", "why do these two two button joysticks
behave so weirdly if I try to use them at the same time for
Speedball 2?", "why do I have to change my sound card IRQ for Doom?".
These are all DOS.
BEEEEEP! WRONG! The machine is two years old P120 with MS-DOS 6.22 and
Win3.1. No Win95 whatsoever. Sound card drivers (MAD16, "SBPro
compatible") were installed per instructions, and generally worked.
It has EVERYTHING to do with DOS and its games. Installing them on that
machine was a true nightmare, maybe half of them worked. That's the
problem with DOS games: you never have even the faintest idea
beforehand if they will work on your system.
And before you claim "if they knew anything about DOS they would
have had no problems", I was there helping them in the end, and
I've been *** with PCs since at least 1989 or so, I definitely
know my way around with DOS and DOS games. But even I had to admit
to them that we shouldn't have to go through all these problems we
had (I even had to edit some the installation batch files so that
they worked properly (incredible!) for some of the games, some
needed some extra attention for the sound card etc.).
Oh sheesh. Now there's a skewed "comparison" if I ever saw one.
Here, let me try this: I compare Ubisoft F1RS (Win95) to
Wacky Wheels (DOS). Damn those DOS games suck big time! ;^)
Worth one 1 fps, and sometimes the Win95 versions are actually faster.
So have you tried any of those games I mentioned? Too bad if it
destroyed your world.