Alexander The 1st

Eniko | Kitsune Tails out now!'s posts Post Back to profile

@JoshJers @eniko Yeah - I'm reminded of the story that allegedly SimCity and it's sequels use the same exe name because Microsoft saw that it has memory management leakage, and instead of just letting it BSOD after a while, made their OS detect when it was running, and gave it a *custom* memory manager that properly did the freeing and allocation instead of expecting it tobbe done correctly.

And then SimCity devs essentially said "Well, it works, and it doesn't cost us to reuse our code..."...

Like 10 August at 10:04 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mstdn.ca

4 comments

Alexander The 1st

@JoshJers @eniko ...and while I'm sure Microsoft is ripping their hair out over maintaining that throughout the OS versions, it's an amazing testament to their commitment to be willing to eat the technical debt of other developers.

That, and the whole "This Windows version is 3.99, because some developers had a bad check that their software was being installed on Windows 3.1 or higher." thing.

10 August at 10:09 | Open on mstdn.ca

Josh Jersild

@AT1ST @eniko "we skipped windows 9 because people were checking for string.StartsWith("Windows 9") to check if it was windows95 or 98 and that still has to work"

10 August at 10:11 | Open on peoplemaking.games

Alexander The 1st

@JoshJers @eniko To some extent, it's making me realize that Texas Instruments doesn't get that kind of rep, and it feels like maybe they should've tried for it.

Like, "Yes, we have a new version of our TI-Nspire models, but they will still run that program of Doom from your father's TI-83 if you upload it to this new calculator model, no changes to the code necessary.".

I have a feeling they didn't do that.

10 August at 10:19 | Open on mstdn.ca

Josh Jersild

@AT1ST @eniko problem is we've all lost our old programs because there was only volatile ram and the batteries have all died at one point in the last 25 years

10 August at 10:20 | Open on peoplemaking.games