LogInMicrosoft worked hard to make sure specific games worked on the system.
Windows 95 has not been popular for a long time now, but there's still something to learn about Microsoft's work. Twitter user KaL noticed how in his blog post, Joel Spolsky, software developer, Fog Creek Software co-founder, and Stack Overflow co-creator, mentioned that Microsoft added some code to ensure SimCity worked on Windows 95 by checking if the system is running the game and then launching the memory allocator in a special mode.
"Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95."
SimCity is not the only game that got "special treatment," another user found out that if Windows NT detects Final Fantasy VII running, it will launch Win95VersionLie, a workaround that tells the game that it's running on Windows 95.
Something similar happens with Dungeon Keeper, where the system puts the files in Windows XP. Tom Clancy's Rainbox Six is stopped from accessing the CD drive, and the system disables Alt+Tab switching while the game is open.
To learn more about Windows 95 tweaks, read this article and check out Spolsky's blog post. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.