Windows 95 went to great lengths to make SimCity and other games compatible.

You can also learn a lot of interesting things about old operating systems. Sometimes things that are already documented (on the blog) miraculously still exist. One such oddity came to light recently when someone noticed how Microsoft is making sure SimCity and other popular apps work on Windows 95.

A recent tweet by @Kalyoshika is an excerpt from a blog post by Fog Creek Software co-founder, Stack Overflow co-author and longtime blogger Joel Spolsky. A larger post focuses on the appeal and demand of chicken-and-egg OS/software. The part that caught the attention of co-host Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast was how the Windows 3.1 version of SimCity worked on a Windows 95 system. Windows 95 combined MS-DOS and Windows applications, upgraded the APIs from 16 to widespread. An app as popular as SimCity, which has sold over 5 million copies, should have run smoothly.

Spolsky’s post summarizes how SimCity became Windows-95 ready, as he heard it, without Maxis or user workarounds.

John Ross, who wrote the original Windows 3.x version of SimCity, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read the newly freed memory. Yeah. On Windows 3.x it worked fine because the memory didn’t go anywhere. Here’s the surprising part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity didn’t work during testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added special code to Windows 95 that SimCity looks for. If it detects that SimCity is running, it starts the memory allocator in a special mode that does not free the memory immediately. It was this obsession with backwards compatibility that drove people to move to Windows 95.

Spolsky (in 2000) credits this to Microsoft and an example of how to solve the chicken and egg problem: “provide a backwards compatibility mode that delivers either a truckload of chickens or a truckload of eggs, depending on how you look at it.”, sit back and grab some bucks.

Windows developers may have deserved some time off seeing the scale of customization they often have to do for individual games and applications in Windows 95. Further down in @Kalyoshika’s answers you can find another example taken from the Windows Compatibility Administrator . Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). @code_and_beer’s screenshot shows how Windows NT, when it finds files normally installed with Final Fantasy VII, implements a compatibility fix with the appropriate name: “Win95VersionLie”. Simply telling the game that it’s running Windows 95 seems to fix a major problem with it running, along with a few other emulation and virtualization tweaks.

Just did it. Very cool.

An example for a game I still own – FF7 – will die instantly if it sees it’s running on Win NT instead of Win95, so Windows is lying about having some files pic.twitter.com/Wc08tSffcz

October 6, 2022

Install the Windows ADK and open the Compatibility Administrator and you will be able to follow some of the things that Windows does for certain applications to make them work in the system database partition. If it finds files named “Horny.tif”and “bullfrog.sbk”, it updates where the Windows 95/98 versions of Dungeon Keeper should put those files on Windows XP and later. Windows should prevent Tom Clancy’s Rainbox Six from accessing the CD drive when it’s already playing a movie or other media file, and also disable Alt+Tab toggling when the game is open because the game can’t handle losing focus. And it’s not just the old names; Street Fighter V slightly changed the implementation of DirectX to work on some systems.

In 2005, longtime Microsoft employee and The Old Newthing blogger Raymond Chen documented Microsoft’s obsession with Windows 95 compatibility. Chen writes that the Windows 95 development manager “took his pickup truck, drove to the local Egghead software store (when Egghead still existed) and bought one copy of every PC program in the store.”Each was responsible for two programs that he installed, ran, and documented for bugs. If an employee finished two, he could return to take two more. And the testers could leave whatever they had completed.

Mike Perry, former creative director of Sim Empire Maxis (and later EA), later noted that a 32-bit version of Sim City for Windows 95 was technically available, as evidenced by the game’s “Deluxe Edition”package. He also states that Ross worked at Microsoft after leaving Maxis, further explaining why Microsoft was so eager to ensure that people can continue to build parks in the grid’s ideal location to increase residents’ happiness levels.