Windows 95 Runs SimCity Specifically

There is a specific piece of code in Microsoft Windows 95 that checks to see if Sim City is running so Win95 can change how memory is stored to work around a bug in Sim City (source joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/str...) Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but 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. 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.

The meme shows text explaining that Microsoft Windows 95 included special code to detect SimCity and alter memory allocation because of a bug in the game. The joke is that Microsoft’s extreme dedication to backward compatibility extended to hardcoding support for one specific game, presenting this oddly specific engineering decision as a reason people loved Windows 95. EN: The meme shows text explaining that Microsoft Windows 95 included special code to detect SimCity and alter memory allocation because of a bug in the game. The joke is that Microsoft’s extreme dedication to backward compatibility extended to hardcoding support for one specific game, presenting this oddly specific engineering decision as a reason people loved Windows 95.

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