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WinG (pronounced Win Gee) is an application programming interface that was designed to provide faster graphics performance on Windows 3.x operating environments. It was initially positioned as a way to help game developers more easily port MS-DOS games to Windows. WinG was quickly discontinued in favor of DirectX.

Background

WinG fixed two problems. The first problem that WinG fixed was that Windows 3.x did not support creating Device Contexts (DCs) based on device independent bitmaps, only actual display devices. One major limitation of the Graphics Device Interface (GDI) DCs was that they were write-only. Data, once written, could not be retrieved. The second problem was that all GDI drawing was implemented in the Windows 3.x video drivers. This included the drawing of bitmaps.

Alex St. John, one of the creators of DirectX, said in a 2000 interview that,

Microsoft announced WinG at the 1994 Game Developers Conference, demonstrating it with a port by id Software of Doom. WinG was shipped on September 21, 1994. WinG, while interesting, was still fundamentally based on drawing bitmaps in memory and outputting frames after the drawing was done. As a result, WinG was deprecated and DirectX was built. However, Windows NT 3.5 and Windows 95 introduced CreateDIBSection to provide support for creating DCs based on DIBs and video drivers also eventually improved.

Implementation

WinG introduced a new type of device context called a WinGDC, allowing programmers to both read and write to it directly using device-independent bitmaps (DIBs) with the wingdib.drv driver. Programmers could write DIBs to the WinGDC and still have access to the individual bits of the image data. This meant that fast graphics algorithms could be written to allow fast scrolling, overdraw, dirty rectangles, double buffering, and other animation techniques. WinG provided much better performance when blitting graphics data to physical graphics device memory. Since WinG used the DIB format, it was possible to mix original GDI API calls and WinG calls.

  • Monopoly (Westwood Studios) (1995)
  • Muppets Inside (1996)
  • Nitemare 3D (1994)
  • Noir: A Shadowy Thriller (1996)
  • P.T.O. II (1995)
  • The Rise & Rule of Ancient Empires (1996)
  • This Means War! (1995)
  • Sid Meier's Colonization (1995)
  • Sid Meier's Civilization II (1996)
  • SimCity 2000 (Windows 16-bit) (1995)
  • SimTower (1994)
  • Sonic's Schoolhouse (1996)
  • Star Wars Screen Entertainment (1994)
  • Time Gate: Knight's Chase (1996)
  • Titanic: Adventure Out of Time (1996)
  • Total Distortion (1995)
  • Toy Story (1996)
  • Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (Map Editor) (1995)
  • Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat (1995)
  • Wishbone Activity Zone (1997)
  • Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth (1995)
  • Entomorph - Plague of the Darkfall (1995)

See also

  • Windows API
  • DOSBox, allows emulation of DOS programs

References

  • Writing HOT Games for Microsoft® Windows™ - The Microsoft Game Developers’ Handbook