281–290 of 424 posts
FWIW, Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity (1995) runs perfectly fine in Windows 10/11 with compatibility mode enabled. No need to test anything else as that's arguably the apex of software (and humanity's collective output). https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mtv-s-beavis-and-butt-hea...
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And that’s why you stand where you are and Microsoft stand where it does. You’re thinking like an engineer. Microsoft is a business. Backwards compatible is its major core competency.
And why you don’t allow developers to make business decisions.
I have an engineering background and then pivoted into managements science, and the difference in perspectives in the two fields is really obvious.
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People forget how every software developer had to spin up their own patch delivery infrastructure.
Back in the day it wasn’t even reasonably possible. You got a floppy/CD from the store and that was the end of the story. I mean, this is “Netscape just came out” times.
It's not insane, it's my expectation for a tool. My hammer still works perfectly well with nails I bought 30 years ago. It's impossible to build on shifting foundations that are constantly breaking backward compatibility. You eventually spend all your time maintaining instead of creating. Then you have to go reinvent your wheel, and in my experience as a user your shiny new one isn't necessarily better. Most of the s…
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Counter-example: Soldier of Fortune is broken on modern windows because of a misapplied compatibility hack. Rename the binary and it works with no problems. This is an awful way to implement backwards compatibility. Opaque and ad-hoc. They have been using similar toolset to break competitors applications. The choice of what old version of windows to run the program on is typically to try them one by one. Linux is no…
> Mac is a mixed bag of excellent Rosetta and breaking apps for no reason. They will probably retire Rosetta2 in a few years, like they did with Rosetta. Apple usually seems to care about getting the bulk of applications to transition over, and the rest is just collateral damage/the devs should’ve just updated their software.
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From where I'm sitting this looks like an excellent argument for breaking backwards compatibility. All those bullshit hacks are a maintenance and debugging burden for someone and a tax on the whole rest of the operating system -- and I'd argue that it really shows.
FWIW Safari and Chrome are also doing this with their “quirks” files: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa... (I can’t find the chrome one)
Lots of Microsoft app compat success stories out there, but plenty of breakage too. One example: I had to create IndirectInput [1][2] to fix Myst on Windows. Microsoft refused (via private email thread with leadership) to take responsibility for what is clearly an appcompat bug and were borderline jerks to me about it too. Oh well. [1] https://github.com/riverar/IndirectInput [2] https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/arti…
See also https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Win…
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From where I'm sitting this looks like an excellent argument for breaking backwards compatibility. All those bullshit hacks are a maintenance and debugging burden for someone and a tax on the whole rest of the operating system -- and I'd argue that it really shows.
Breaking backwards compatibility was one of the biggest customer criticisms of Windows Vista.
This drove me into looking for a vanilla executable that wouldn't have that after-the-fact DRM, and I discovered the 1.13 mod. So, I had one happy experience with Vista.