Direct X the history of MS windows PC gaming..

iv-tecman

iv-tecman

iv-tecman

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Was just looking up on recent events regarding DX11, supported games etc and came across this –

In 1994 Microsoft was working on a new operating system, Windows 95. The Microsoft game programming platform of that time was DOS. Most programmers found DOS a better platform to build on, then the new Windows 95.

DOS was seen as a better platform because DOS allowed direct access to video cards, mouse, keyboards and sound devices (and the rest of the system). Windows 95 restricted the access to all of these components because of its protected memory model. Microsoft needed a way to give the programmers the same access to these devices on the new operating system Windows 95.

Three Microsoft employees, Criag Eisler, Alex St.John and Eric Engstrum, came together to fix this problem. (They eventually named the solution DirectX). They build the first version of DirectX upon the concepts of another development system “Exodus”. “Exodus” was developed by Kinesoft Development. Microsoft and Kinesoft worked closely that year (1994) to develop DirectX 1.0.

In September of 1995 the first version of DirectX was released. (They used the name “Windows games SDK” for that version).

In the years after 1995, Microsoft released a new version of DirectX at least once a year. (See the release history for more detail).

In the year 2002 Microsoft released DirectX 9. (This release included shader version 2.0 support). Microsoft has continued to update DirectX 9. In 2004 they released DirectX 9.0c which supported the shader model 3.0.

Version 10 of DirectX is available on the new operating system from Microsoft, called Vista.

The components DirectInput and DirectSound will be deprecated in DirectX 10. Xinput and XACT (developed for Xbox) will replace DirectInput and DirectSound. Until now Xinput and XACT don’t have the same capabilities as DirectInput and DirectSound.
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Just wondering if anyone could remember the very first Direct X games under Windows 95. I’m trying to remember some of them, wasn’t tomb raider II one of them or was that Direct X 3?

I always hear Direct X and automatically think of Direct X 9.0c and Half Life 2 lol or xbox 360 even..

Who can remember their first Direct X game and what was it, and can anyone remember or know what the first retail released direct X game actually was?
 
I can't remember anything specifically but I do remember a lot of games that just wouldn't work unless you installed the Direct X package in the installer, even if you had a later version!
 
I can remember my sister purchasing a game by the now long gone Trilobyte called Clandestiny and this game practically wrecked my sisters Windows 95 install as when she installed Direct x and she rebooted, her computer failed to boot correctly… It took me a while in safe mode to remove and then safely re-install Direct x.

I’m fairly sure my first Direct x game was Tomb Raider II. But I think it was Direct x 3.0 and I remember Shadows of the Empire by Lucasarts but this was much later on…
 
badcompany said:
Opengl what happened to that i always picked opengl rather than dx when given the choice as you used to back in the day.
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What happened to that was that Microsoft heavily subsidised companies who used DirectX and now they say it would be more expensive to move to OpenGL than to stay. In terms of capabilities i'd say OpenGL 4.2 is at least on par with DX11, sadly there's nothing to demonstrate those capabilities as far as i'm aware :(
 
I never saw any games that required DirectX 1. I think C&C needed DirectX 2? Or maybe it was 3, not totally sure.
 
Pitfall the Mayan adventure by Activision was one of the launch title's for DirectX on PC-CD-Rom. Came in a massive box with the CD slipcase inside & streaming CD-Audio as well as enhanced gfx over the console versions of this game. Then shortly after Earthwood Jim also by Activision. Within 3 years all the big console titles were coming out on PC at the same time & far superior technically as DirectX, 3DFX & OpenGL made them much better experiences along with streaming CD-Audio from the CD. Back in those days a game like Star Wars Rebel Assault sold over 1m copies @ £45 each or The 7th Guest @ £69.99 each copy sold over a million worldwide then along came Command & Conquer 1 (another early DirectX game) which sold over 3M copies on PC :eek: compare those numbers to recent PC games struggling to even reach 6 figures let alone 7 & you can see why publishers/developers are not as keen on PC recently :rolleyes: Tomb Raiders1-5, Quake1-3 were also the main reasons why DirectX & OpenGL took off as those games sold massive numbers on PC & helped kick start the modern 2.5D game engine era we are still in today ;)



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Direct X 3 (or even 5) is where my memory kicks in. I do remember the idea of gaming in windows to be a very novel, but fundamentally terrible experience. They were a poor cousin to the DOS versions.

TBH I think you had to be a bit of sadist to game in Win 95, or even to use Win 95 for that matter. :D For me it wasn't until Direct X6 that windows gaming became acceptable.
 
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Ah the memories. Win 95 would be on my first pentium computer. 1 GB of memory that quickly got reduced to just over 300 MB at which point I attempted to clear the disk of trash by deleting whatever I deemed unnecessary. Needless to say plenty .dll's found themselves on that list and I ended up having to format my drive :P. Them were also the days when DX 4 - 6 ( ?) struck fear into my heart as each new version brought plenty of new bugs causing computer crashing all the time.
 
I think that mechwarrior 2 was probably the first one that I remember, but cannot be certain, generally stuck with dosmode for most things for a long time.
 
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