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.
The online games have depressingly (to me) small communities. But they’re still kicking.
The amazing work the Wine team and Valve have done can't be understated.
Something funny about this statement considering what Proton is.
My guess is, an impossibly high effort that would benefit Quake, but perhaps not other games of that era.
Microsoft is the reason Quake works on Proton still today.
Why do we need Windows 11 to support old software when we can use an older version of Windows, in an emulator at that. Playing Quake doesn't require a secure, patched box, and if a secure environment is the point of extreme backwards compat, then it seems like endless backwards compatibility is not the best way to achieve that goal (sandboxing an old, emulated OS, for example, comes to mind as more reasonable).
Letting Microsoft play this backwards compatibility card feels not healthy for the evolution of software or the diversification of the industry.
Regularly doing it basically forces developers into a limited-term license, subscription, or SaaS model, in order to pay for the upgrade churn required by the platform.
And a lot of it is just churn. Not evolution, not better, just .. different.
Not good for evolution, but fantastic for diversification. Being able to write a program that solves a problem and be "done" with it is fantastic, but having the platform walk out from under you requires ongoing work. That ongoing work often demands payment...so platforms that constantly change tend to be highly commercialized.
Open source on Android suffers from this. So many "done" apps are no longer compatible.
And the changes to the underlying platform may not be benevolent. Android, for example, deprecated their API for filesystem access and introduced a scoped replacement that was two orders of magnitude slower. They then banned Syncthing, a file sharing tool, from the Play Store because it doesn't use the latest APIs (APIs are so slow that SyncThing is unusable...the opened bug hasn't been addressed in the intervening years).
The lesson is that any platform that is a moving target presents a risk to both the developer and the user, as that movement concentrates power with the platform owner in a way more more slow moving (or static) platform does not.
All that said, I use Linux 100x as much as I use Windows, because it gives me other kinds of control.
Also the barrier to use you're suggesting with alternative install/emulator is pretty high for an average user. It also breaks integration with everything else (e.g., a simple alt-tab will show the VM instead of 2 apps running inside)
Also because a lot of progress is regression, so having an old way to opt out into is nice
As a concrete example, the source to quake is available, this has allowed quake to run on so many platforms and windows infamous backwards compatibility has little effect in keeping quake running, windows could have broken backwards compatibility and quake would still run on it.
The amazing part is that you don't need to do this in windows whether you have the source or not. I am a linux user, but for all their faults, Microsoft got their backwards compatibility stuff right. Something that the oss world, on average, needs to be convinced it's a desirable thing.
Quite a lot of game source is lost entirely even by the original authors.
Not to mention that even if you do have the source, changing the use of an API can be a really expensive software modification project. Even Microsoft haven't been entirely systematic, you can easily find WinForms control panel dialogs in Win11.
Some embedded Windows apps exist in this space as well. Oscilloscopes and other expensive scientific instruments that run Windows XP.
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.
software renderers are so much fun.
Why?
I tried running Quake 2 on Windows NT 4 before 2k came out so like '98/'99 but had an issue as NT lacked DirectX. My memory has faded and I don't remember if the installer failed or it failed to run. I think it was the former as I have a recollection of something complaining about missing DirectX.
I do know that multi-processing was implemented in Quake 3 and I specifically ran Windows 2000 for that.
As result - i was able to play some windowed games without 3D acceleration.