<i>> 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</i><p>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 <i>every old program they could find</i> with Windows 95".<p>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 <i>one</i> game’s bug".
Rough guess but this is all content farming of Raymond Chen posts at <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/" rel="nofollow">https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/</a> 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.
From an article on this[0]:<p>> 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.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...</a>
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.<p>The only positive thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t appear to be written by AI.<p>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.<p>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.
Why show a screenshot of a different game (SimCity 2000) when discussing SimCity?
This is a great example of how implementation becomes the specification.
This is why memory allocators should be linked into applications and should not be considered operating system components.
I wouldn't be surprised by windows components that use this. Wish I could run 16-bit apps tho.
What else could be expected of Redmond's finest?
I don’t know much about CPU and memory back then, but did they not have some kind of memory access debugging mode where it would match every access against the alloc map, understanding that it could be very slow, but would find some of this kind of bug? Come to think of it, do we even have that today?