Tag: windows
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Here’s ‘Doom’ running on Windows Notepad somehow
![A screenshot of 'Doom' running in Windows Notepad.](https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/06GGAdT557MaVeHKfkjS4IV/hero-image.jpg)
A developer has made Doom run in Windows Notepad, the bare-bones text editor that was absolutely not designed to run video games. Humankind’s hubris continues to twist the natural order, accumulating a debt that must one day come due.
Sam Chiet shared his achievement on Twitter, posting a video of Doom running on Notepad at 60 frames per second in fuzzy black and white ASCII art. According to Chiet, the footage has not been sped up, and Notepad’s code has not been modified or tampered with.
“this is fully playable interactive live, zero fakery. this is exactly what it looks like,” he wrote.
“finally, i created the ideal way to play. you’re welcome.”
Chiet is no stranger to utilising his coding powers for silly software shenanigans. The self-proclaimed “idea goblin/experiment-creator” previously released Desktop Goose — an avian desktop menace whose sole purpose is to steal your cursor, wreck your life, and look adorable while doing it.
Fortunately for anyone who dreams of playing an early ’90s first-person shooter entirely in ASCII art themselves, Chiet is currently working on making Notepad Doom suitable to be unleashed upon the wider public.
“it’ll take some work to polish NotepadDOOM into something releasable, but it’ll almost certainly happen over the next couple days,” Chiet tweeted.
Released in 1993, Doom is a first-person shooter originally developed by id Software for the now ancient operating system MS-DOS. This classic game doesn’t take much to run by today’s standards, with computers, games, and graphics having significantly evolved since its release almost 30 years ago.
Getting Doom to run on unconventional platforms has thus become an ongoing meme, with tech-savvy chaos gremlins getting it to work on everything from a MacBook Pro Touch Bar, to a NordicTrack treadmill, to a John Deere tractor, to a digital pregnancy test. They’ve even Inception-ed Doom to run on a virtual computer in Minecraft.
Now Windows Notepad can be added to the long, weird list of things that run Doom. Though whether anyone’s eyes can parse the ASCII art long enough to finish the game is another matter.
More Than 4 In 10 PCs Still Can’t Upgrade To Windows 11
Other findings from Lansweeper show adoption rates for the latest OS are improving, running on 1.44 percent of computers versus 0.52 percent in January. This means the latest incarnation has overtaken Windows 8 in the popularity stakes but remains behind market share for Windows 7, despite that software going end of life in January 2020. Adoption is, unsurprisingly, higher in the consumer space. Some 4.82 percent of the biz devices researched were running an OS that wasn’t fully supported and 0.91 percent had servers in their estate that are end of life.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Windows 95 Went the Extra Mile To Ensure Compatibility of SimCity, Other Games
Spolsky’s post summarizes how SimCity became Windows 95-ready, as he heard it, without input from Maxis or user workarounds: “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.”
Spolsky (in 2000) considers this a credit to Microsoft and an example of how to break the chicken-and-egg problem: “provide a backwards compatibility mode which either delivers a truckload of chickens, or a truckload of eggs, depending on how you look at it, and sit back and rake in the bucks.” Windows developers may have deserved some sit-back time, seeing the extent of the tweaks they often have to make for individual games and apps in Windows 95. Further in @Kalyoshika’s replies, you can find another example, pulled from the Compatibility Administrator in Windows’ Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). A screenshot from @code_and_beer shows how Windows NT, upon detecting files typically installed with Final Fantasy VII, will implement a fittingly titled compatibility fix: “Win95VersionLie.” Simply telling the game that it’s on Windows 95 seems to fix a major issue with its operation, along with a few other emulation and virtualization tweaks. “Mike Perry, former creative director at Sim empire Maxis (and later EA), noted later that there was, technically, a 32-bit Windows 95 version of Sim City available, as shown by the ‘Deluxe Edition’ bundle of the game,” adds Ars. “He also states that Ross worked for Microsoft after leaving Maxis, which would further explain why Microsoft was so keen to ensure people could keep building parks in the perfect grid position to improve resident happiness.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What’s New in Windows 11’s 2022 Update: Top 10 New Features (22H2)
![](https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/start-windows-11-dark.png?width=600&height=250&fit=crop&trim=2,2,2,2)
Windows 11’s 2022 update is here. This first update, also known as 22H2, was once codenamed “Sun Valley 2” during development. With Windows 11, Microsoft has moved to a yearly release cycle for major updates, leaving behind Windows 10’s frantic twice-per-year schedule.