• JerkyChew@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    ITT: People who don’t know that Windows 95-98 and Windows ME were gui front-ends for a DOS kernel.

    Most games of this era wouldn’t run on Windows 2000, the first consumer Windows OS not built on DOS.

    • Flamekebab@piefed.social
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      2 hours ago

      I never encountered a single Windows 9x game that wouldn’t run on Windows 2000 Pro. It was my primary OS in 2003 or so, having moved from Windows 98 SE.

      Is this a case of confidently incorrect?

    • curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
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      17 hours ago

      ME was the only consumer release in 2000.

      2000 was the direct successor to NT4 and was specifically targeting the business market. It was available in Pro, Server, Adv Server, and Datacenter editions. I would not call it a consumer Windows OS.

      • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        That‘s interesting because I remember our home computer ran on it for a while. I guess that was only because my father was friends with a PC shop owner who knew about it.

        • curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
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          6 hours ago

          ME was basically 98 but much less stable, so a lot of people grabbed a copy of 2000 one way or another to run it at home. XP came out in 2001, bringing an end to DOS based kernels in the Microsoft lineup.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      I distinctly remember running most, if not all, of my games on Windows 2000 (not ME). I mean, yeah, NT 4 was pretty hopeless for gaming, but 2000 was better.

    • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      Windows was built on IBM compatible MS-DOS, not regular DOS. The term “DOS” was so ubiquitous with IBM compatibility specifically, that it almost exclusively referred to MS-DOS, and not any other variant. Windows 95 does not run on top of Atari DOS, for example, and therefore trying to run any Windows 95 application in Atari DOS would not be possible.

      Software natively compiled for Windows 95 will not usually run in any other variant of DOS than MS-DOS, and in some cases, even MS-DOS itself.

      Quake II released in 1997 natively for Windows 95, but was not compatible with other DOS based operating systems at the time. Over the years, fans have tried to “backport” it to other variants of DOS, most notably Q2DOS. But its original PC release does not natively support any OS other than Windows 95. Many games of this era are like this, and a game released in this era usually said it was compatible with “Windows 95/98/ME,” not “DOS.”