Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
In: 4
Problem 1 is compatibility only goes so far. Really old games ran on DOS or old versions of Windows and old versions of DirectX. Graphics cards ran in 8-bit colour mode (not to be confused with 8 bits per colour of red, green and blue). Nowsdays those kinds of settings and versions of operating systems don’t really exist any more or are not well tested.
The second is that modern systems are CRAZY fast. Even in a 3d game, I could get 1,000 fps on a modern system for an old game. Think about what that means to a game. You read the current time to the millisecond. Then you draw a frame and process the physics of the game. You read the current time to the millisecond again to see how much time has passed. Answer: NONE. It has been 0 milliseconds since you did all that. By the game’s standards, that’s an impossibility. The developers probably had no means of causing that to happen when the game was written. That could cause a division-by-zero event right there. Who knows how the game might glitch out when something like that happens if the developers didn’t think of it.
Modern games are better by virtue of us having a much wider array of hardware, but also better development tools. Things have gotten better. Fewer assumptions have been made. And perhaps most importantly, software developed NOW tends to work properly NOW, no matter what era you live in.
There are changes in how the hardware work overtime, its primary graphic system the changes on PC in a way that are not always backward compatible
In the same way, there is changes in the operating system over time and once again what has changed most is the advanced graphics features that game uses.
PC hardware and Microsoft windows are quite good in regards to backward compatibility, It is primary for property software used by companies and usually does not use advanced graphics features.
The ability to run on older hardware and OS for games can be done because how they work is a known quantity so you can add code if required to handle differences. The backward compatibly will be to the hardware and OS that play the game at a reasonable performance or limit to what potential customers out there use and to what degree the extra works worth increase in sales.
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