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Comment by abanana | Hacker News Reader

> The tradition goes back to SimCity, which only ran on Windows 95 because Microsoft wrote special code for it... Yes, Microsoft modified its OS just to cover up one game’s bug... The SimCity hack was a one-off

The stuff around SimCity in this article is poorly written. It seems the author has misunderstood it to have been a one-off special case. I looked back at Joel Spolsky's article, and he does make it quite clear that the SimCity example was just one of many: "it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95".

The article does later mention "Windows XP’s hidden database of app fixes" but doesn't appreciate that the concept really started with Windows 95, and in a big way, not "just to cover up one game’s bug".

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Rough guess but this is all content farming of Raymond Chen posts at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ though I can't find a smoking gun. I definitely remember an article about Intuit doing something some dumb they had to keep an internal API around reporting the wrong value or something like that.

Here's the reference to the testing scheme that Windows 95 came up with from Raymond Chen's blog - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050824-11/?p=34...

  Buy up one copy of every software package available at Egghead Software and have your team test it and file bugs.

I used to work as a QA Engineer @ Transmeta testing software om out CPUs to ensure x86 compatibility. My manager this operated like this. She would constantly look for old software to acquire. One of her favorite activities was dumpster diving outside of startups that had failed to pick up old copies of software on CDs and floppy disks. I remember testing a lot of Diablo 2, Tomb Raider of various versions, Star Wars Episode I Racer, and Risk (for Windows 3.0).

After completing a Hardcore Hell Sorceress run, I’m happy to report our CPUs are fully compatible with this software.

I found a bug where our system would freeze after playing Tomb Raider 2 on a certain CPU/chipset combo. If I remember correctly, it turned out to be a unacceptable voltage drop somewhere in the south bridge.

“You know I may need to double check. Clear my schedule for another week.”

I both love this story and am worried it’s basically a tale of how someone’s parents sold them on Santa being real. It stinks of a con where she was just day drinking somewhere near an Egghead.

From an article on this[0]:

> 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.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

I worked for this place that made a security auditing tool. The agent had to know which version of Windows it was running on. When Microsoft came out with a new version, the agent didn't know what it was running on, since it hadn't been updated to include that version. I forget what it did in response, but it didn't run right - maybe just terminated?

Microsoft discovered this in their testing, before they released the new Windows version. In response, they added our agent to a list of programs that Windows would lie to about the Windows version. If our program asked, we would be told the previous version.

Well, that was great, in that our program didn't terminate early (or whatever it did). But now, even after we updated our agent, it still wouldn't know whether it was running on the new version of Windows, and so would not audit it correctly!

This dance shows just how far Microsoft went with backward compatibility. We were not a top-1000-most-used program by any means, but they knew about us and tested us and fixed for us. (I mean, we didn't want it, in this case, but it was still impressive.)

How did they identify your software? Could you guys produce a sibling program whose job is to identify the windows version and notify the main program?

I believe they identified it by the name of the executable. IIRC, we did exactly what your second sentence says.

If you look at the compatibility tool you'll see multiple checks not only executable name match. It can check version headers and other signatures.

The article’s content is generally quite weak, could probably have been covered in an old school tweet with screenshots and nothing of value would have been lost.

The only positive thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t appear to be written by AI.

I don’t think this person truly understands what they’re writing about, they did a little research, made some screenshots and put enough words in the article so that it will show up in search engines.

It’s reminiscent to me of many articles on Windows error codes, almost all of them are basically generic, generally quite long with drivel, and steering you to install some “fix it” software. Any technical person coming across these just finds them annoying as they clearly gamed the search results with unhelpful content.

One may even speculate the author got some, or a lot of ... "help", if it's even a real author.

Nothing wrong with getting help from AI as long as you’re applying good and qualified judgment on what parts of its help is decent.

They didn't. They just rephrased someone else's blog series.

I didn't say they did, I just remarked in general that using AI is not itself a bad thing.

We know a lot of this from the Windows NT leaks, its a shame that clearly Windows was a drastically better maintained OS than today. In the NT leaks there were comments about things like adding support for things like Delphi to ensure it compiles.

I have read some similar things about macOS having app-specific fixes for popular apps.

It might have been this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034413

Didn't they also make sure Lotus 123 didn't run as well as it could have?

That was a very old, very tasteless gag from someone who didn't understand the situation.

MS has always bent over backwards to retain backwards compatibility, to the extent that it's genuinely a corporate weakness: it's slowed software releases, bulked them up with patches and tweaks and special-case exceptions, and prevented the company from keeping the OSes relatively reasonably-sized by dropping obsolete features.

Linux is starting to do this now, but only because the team's hand is being forced by LLM-bot vulnerability discovery. So it's dropping loads of old drivers -- but then, the kernel is mostly drivers, hundreds of thousands of them.

Apple is more proactive: it regularly says "this is the next to last version that does [function X] and the release after next will remove that.

I've been using OS X since 10.0, after 13 years using classic MacOS. Over that time, OS X has progressively dropped:

* The Blue Box VM for running Classic apps (removed in 10.5)

* Then the PowerPC version (removed in 10.6)

* Then Rosetta for running PowerPC apps (removed in 10.7)

* Then the AppleTalk network sharing protocol connections -- printers remained (I forget when)

* Then 32-bit app support (removed in 10.15)

I'm on macOS 15, on an 11YO iMac thanks to OCLP. Soon I'll be forced onto Tahoe simply because it's the last ever x86 version. The current beta of OCLP supports this. I will wait for the final release.

It periodically warns me that the AppleShare over TCP/IP is going away too. Won't directly affect me on an Intel Mac.

* Intel support is going in macOS 27

I am willing to bet Rosetta 2 and x86 binary support will go by macOS 28 or so.

It also dropped HFS writing, leaving only R/O HFS support. That may be gone now. Not tried in a few years but circa 10.13 it could happily mount a 30YO floppy disk in a USB diskette drive.

Since 10.14 it will only boot off APFS although HSF+ R/W support is fine.

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