Windows 95 went the extra mile to ensure compatibility of SimCity, other games
Enlarge / Microsoft wanted people to have zero reasons not to upgrade to Windows 95. That meant making sure SimCity Classic worked, with some memory-reading workarounds. (credit: Chris Hsia / Flickr)
It's still possible to learn a lot of interesting things about old operating systems. Sometimes those things were documented, or at least hinted at, in blog posts that miraculously still exist. One such quirk showed up recently when someone noticed how Microsoft made sure that SimCity and other popular apps worked on Windows 95.
A recent tweet by @Kalyoshika highlights an excerpt from a blog post by Fog Creek Software co-founder, Stack Overflow co-creator, and longtime software blogger Joel Spolsky. The larger post is about chicken-and-egg OS/software appeal and demand. The part that caught the eye of a Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast co-host is how the Windows 3.1 version of SimCity worked on the Windows 95 system. Windows 95 merged MS-DOS and Windows apps, upgraded APIs from 16 to 32-bit, and was hyper-marketed. A popular app like SimCity, which sold more than 5 million copies, needed to work without a hitch.
Spolsky's post summarizes how SimCity became Windows 95-ready, as he heard it, without input from Maxis or user workarounds.