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Why WinQuake exists and how it works

151 points by wicket

by 71bw

3 subcomments

  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. :-)

by klaussilveira

2 subcomments

If you are like me and like to toy around with ancient game engines, for the sake of simply modding or trying things out, I made this tiny clean fork: https://github.com/klaussilveira/clean-quake
The idea is that it builds on 64-bit Linux with a very simple Makefile and SDL2, so you can start from there as your ground truth, and then have fun. It also removes a lot of cruft, like all the DOS and Windows 95 stuff mentioned in the article.

by progmetaldev

0 subcomment

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.

by victorbuilds

0 subcomment

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.

by markus_zhang

1 subcomments

Link to MGL v4 programmer guide seems to be broken. I’m super curious about this technique — can we do the same nowadays for modern Windows and video cards?

by timcobb

3 subcomments

> Last but not least, id Software really wanted Quake to work on Windows NT.
Why?

by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF

2 subcomments

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.

0 subcomment