Windows 95 had dedicated code to nix an OG Sim City bug
pcgamer.comThe nature of the internet is that an amazing piece of information can be out there for decades, before the right person shares it and everyone's slightly gobsmacked we missed it for so long. This is hardly the most consequential of tales, but it was first shared by software engineer Joel Spolsky way back in the year 2000 in a post about the chicken and egg problem for platform and software developers.
A few days ago Kal Yoshika, a podcaster and game developer, read the blogpost and shared this story about Sim City (and the tweet was subsequently picked up by outlets including RPS) that's just been out there in the wilds for the past twenty years.
Spolsky is writing about how important backwards compatibility was for Microsoft, and how the success of Windows 3, in Spolsky's interpretation at least, could in part be put down to how well it ran older software. Thus we move onto Windows 95…
«Windows 95? No problem,» writes Spolsky. «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."
On a different operating system, however, this bug could stop the game working altogether: and SimCity was a very popular game indeed.
«Here’s the amazing part,» writes Spolsky. «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
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