Funny thing is I was just looking up info on WinG. It basically provided the same as X's shared-memory pixmap extension: here's an in-memory framebuffer which you can also get as an HBITMAP and fast-blit to the screen without having to round-trip the whole image between CPU and video memory. The emergence of what Amigaheads call "chunky graphics" (all pixel components in memory sequentially) as a default in SVGA hardware is really what enabled this development; DIBs were chunky but on EGA or 16-color VGA the underlying hardware could be planar, necessitating the slow conversion of a DIB into a video-card-friendly format before it could be blitted.<p>Basic sprite graphics were possible -- and even fast -- on Win16 before WinG if you stored your sprites as HBITMAPs and blitted them with a mask to a back-buffer bitmap, then used double buffering to render this to the display. I created a demo of Mario running around in a window to the amusement of my high school friends in this way.
Oh my God, WinG. That lasted for what - a year? I think I was using it seriously at one point. Part of the ultimate quest for a generic graphics library (suitable for gaming, or whatever).
Good ol' WinG. Did it even gain any traction before DirectX took over?<p>More than anything that article reminds me how great PC Magazine was. They had technical articles written by guys like Neil Rubenking, Charles Petzold, and Jeffrey Richter.
Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft<p><a href="http://amzn.com/dp/0609604163" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/dp/0609604163</a><p>TL;DR: the history of WinG and DirectX<p>The Wikipedia entry is also worth checking out: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG</a>
If you find this kind of stuff interesting, GDC Vault hosts back issues of Game Developer back to 1994: <a href="http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag" rel="nofollow">http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag</a>
Interesting that page 29 has an article saying flexible displays may be just around the corner. And all the laptops cost $7500, and a digital camera was $10,995.
BTW, 1994 saw the release of some of the greatest classics in PC gaming:<p>X-COM,
Doom 2,
Warcraft,
Colonization,
Panzer General<p>And quite a few others.