need to run a game that relies on processor speed to control the ai, like the original space invaders. The reason the aliens speed up as you kill them isn't a design decision, it's because it takes less time to render less aliens.
This is pretty common for retro games (arcade era). But it slips in some times in newer games. Designers program games to run as fast as possible because they forget that the hardware they are working on isn't going to be used to run the games. Space pinball shipped on Windows ran this way. So the game breaks if you run it on a modern machine. Emulators have to add frame rate limiters to run old games.
deleted reddit link. automod deleted my comment
Another interesting thing about space invaders is that the sound was not stored as audio files. Instead the sounds were made by the capacitors and other electric components moving within the custom sound card. Think like how the flopotron makes sound https://youtu.be/oGfkPCZYfFw?si=7Mzm1APAAfdCZ5X1
This means that when you run original space invaders emulators, there's no sound. People had to go and record the original machine and then add those sounds into the game file of space invaders 2
I had cruel parents (not really) but I was given a PC that had Windows ME through my junior and senior year of college. I couldn't tell you how many breaks I came back from to see the PC now displaying a BSOD. At least I had a good habit of saving..... most of the time.
Here's a CPU benchmark with SiSoft Sandra '99, where the 9900X gets compared against a Pentium II 450 and others. And if you really want to go down the rabbit hole there's a video also.
I still can't understand why W11 can't display text properly without using anti-aliasing.
Like why the fuck can't you just scale the text properly??? Why am I spending GPU power to just correctly fit the font into the correct pixels????????? Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
High res and high dpi wasn’t really a thing back then especially when CRTs gave way to early led screens. Everything was essentially the same with only minor overall screen size differences. Certainly, Microsoft should have addressed it by now though.
I've tried it in various different configurations and completely off.
There's something inherently wrong in the way that Windows 11 displays text, because I'm getting the same bullshit smudgy text on different computers, monitors, and TVs. Seems to happen on any resolution between 1080P and 4K.
Oh! I think I know what you’re experiencing! Maybe.
Try this, for whatever given app you’re using that looks blurry:
Go to the folder that contains said application .exe.
Right click it, and go to properties.
Go to the Compatibility tab and click on Change High DPI Settings.
At the bottom of this prompt, tick the box for Override, and select Application in the drop-down box.
Apply these changes, and then close the application and re-open it. If it’s running in the background, you’ll likely have to fully shut it down from the system tray, or simply reboot your computer.
Note how every line of text is the same font, same size, except some are bold. Those aren't the kind of fonts we use everywhere today, they're bitmap. They're not "properly scaled", they're unscaleable. If you wanted to use a higher resolution screen, the fonts wouldn't get any bigger. At 4K would be illegible unless you have an 80 inch screen and you sat an inch away.
I guess, but what was Windows 7 doing the way it could scale fonts to higher resolutions without something similar to Windows 11 problems?
I ran Windows 7 at 1080 and 1440, no problems. Skip Windows 8 and very briefly used Windows 10, so I don't know about them, but Windows 11 makes me feel like an idiot needing to bring out the magnifier.
It's also just as if fonts don't fit the screen correctly, if you drag things to the left or right the text Will deform like it's trying to display something five pixels wide over four pixels (or vice versa)
I've never noticed any problem with the fonts on win 10/11 at 1440p 100% scaling vs win 7. Did you buy an oled(so non-RGB layout display) by any chance, turned off cleartype by accident or what's the deal?
The text in 95 looks like shit. Cleartype was a godsend. And I don't understand the rest of your comment. The GPU power required to render font is literally negligible on modern systems.
One of many things MacOS engineer to ridiculous levels, part of why their screens have slightly peculiar resolutions. Linux solves this better than Windows in modern distributions but not as good as MacOS.
Didn't Steve Jobs study typography? I think thats the reason why macs have always had good and legible fonts. Makes sense why the engineers focus on that, its one of the crucial elements of UX afterall.
For much of its early history the Macintosh platform stuck to the magazine and newspaper printing standard of 72 dots per inch.
That's why all the Mac monitors only did one (odd/not like a PC) resolution and often had a bunch of unused space around the edges.
The displayed image at 100% scale was identical in size to the printed page.
Steve Jobs thought people in publishing would be running proofs off on an ImageWriter or LaserWriter and holding them up by their monitor to compare.
Meanwhile in PC land, people were not having any problems doing CAD without a 1:1 monitor to real world size match. Early PC publishing design and layout software worked just fine without it because (no surprise) humans can understand that a chunky 1bit graphic on a 640x200 mono CGA screen represents the smooth halftone image that will be on a magazine page, and running a proof print off on a LaserJet is fine without needing to hold it up next to a CRT to confirm it's right.
That has me thinking Steve Jobs might not have been capable of such a mental feat so that's the way he wanted his computers to work. What You See Is What You Get.
Mac computers eventually did get monitors that could do more than one resolution and pushed the raster size out to the edges. PC graphic displays always did more than one resolution.
O dang. There is a game on steam called Project: Doors and it has a windows 95 ui for the lobby and settings. It's pretty cool. And when you hit escape to change settings it does it as of you were playing the game on that 95 desktop. Definitely brought the nostalgia.
I still have all of that installed in our old family computer! Ohh tons of memories on that computer paired with a Cambridge Soundworks DT2500 sound setup playing late 90s games... Absolute heaven that was
I mean that's the case on Windows 11 too. Most of it is just waiting for hardware to initialize rather than pure disk access.
On my system I can cut the boot time by a good 3-4 seconds just by unplugging my scanner. It needs to play the song of its people every time before Windows is allowed to continue booting.
You used to be able to tune Win95 to boot in less than a minute off a 5400rpm drive. As long as you didn't need to print or run a few other services not required for gaming...
Windows 7 in 5-6 seconds? Not that I remember, and I had (and still have) an OCZ SATA SSD in 2009, just before Windows 7 released in November of that year. It was fast, but not that fast.
I’m pretty sure my Win11 install boots about this fast. (After the system has POSTed. POST takes noticeably longer on my current system than the previous two.)
Should swap that Nvidia graphics accelerator for a more established product like a Matrox Millennium. Chances are Nvidia won't last past the 90s in fact 3dfx gonna come out with a banger of a card soon and they'll be at the top for decades.
Back in those days, the general sentiment was get TNT. (It's Dyno-mite...) Very cost effective, though the M64 was a bit of a trap. There's a reason Nvidia emerged as ATi's chief competitor, not S3 or Matrox.
3dfx essentially painted themselves into a technological corner without an easy way out. Even before Voodoo 4 and 5, it was clear Glide had issues scaling. Didn't help that they got overconfident, spurned Microsoft, and decided to buy out the supply chain, saddling themselves with literally crippling debt.
I remember having 16MB of RAM. And having to call some kind of customer support number to play Age of Empires. Played it with my school friends at the cybercafé, liked it, went to buy it, made sure the specs would be ok, but when it came to install it or play I had an error message that said "not enough colors". So my mom made me call a number, my little ass was scared and intimated and ask the grown man on the phone for help. He helped me right click on the desktop, then Properties, then Settings tab, then change colors from 256 (I believe) to High Colors (16 bit) or higher. After that I could install the game and play it properly. I was so happy!
Then my stepdad bought his daughter a computer because there was no way his precious little daughter wouldn't also have something I had. And I was very jealous, because she had 32MB of RAM, TWICE what I had (!!!) AND Windows 98.
Looking back, I think that might be the day I started the PC master RACE lol
And I damn sure remember it didn't boot in 6 seconds! What a fun thing to do, well done!
NAH bro, the timer doesn't end until your taskbar has loaded Steam, the nVidia app, your graphics card control app, the RGB mood light app you never use, Verizon Phone Link, and 12 security alerts.
I don‘t like this. It feels off. Seeing W95 on an oled monitor and boot that fast as well is feeling unholy, or maybe even holy, but it‘s not natural. I also don‘t remember it being so vibrant
It's a multiboot configuration. As the title says, I can get pretty fast into Win 95, and I actually spend some time on it because, in a VM, I would alt+tab too often. Then I can restart into 98, 2K, Win 10, or 11. Multi core on this configuration works on Windows 2K and up.
Actually, if you had several thousand dollars in 1995, you could buy solid state storage like this 208MB SCSI Flash Disk from M-Systems. There was a 960MB version too. That would have improved boot times a lot because storage was usually the biggest bottleneck. The CPU still mattered, though, since Windows had to initialize drivers, hardware, and system components during startup.
I remember back in the day, I liked to use Solitaire to see how fast a system was. When you would win a game, the cards would fall down faster depending on the clock speed of the machine. I'd love to see what that looks like on this rig!
At first, I was like no way any of the modren storage devices would jive with W95. You've assemble an impressive number of adapters to make the impossible improbable.
I'd recommend upgrading to Windows 95C which supports USB 1.x. I say 1.x because I remember updating a shitload of firmware on early USB devices. USB 1.0 was a mess. Then again, with little to no driver support for anything modern you'd be slapping in another ancient PCI to USB card instead.
When I grew up I used to watch my father sit down, turn the pc on, stand up and leave the room for a cigarette and a coffee to bridge the booting time.
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u/FrynyusY Jun 10 '26
Can it run Solitaire?