Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

I find it fascinating how similar yet different VS was ~30 years ago. You can absolutely tell the DNA is already there and the whole thing feels so familiar, just lacking in functions we today take for granted.

Also, if you by chance never seen this person's blog before, I highly recommend checking out some of his other posts too. Not only has he been doing deep dives into several other retro games since 2008, he also wrote the Game Engine Black Book DOOM and Wolfenstein books which are long explorations of both games' engines and internals.

(This is only tangentially related to the blogpost, but: Maybe it's just blind nostalgia, but there is something remarkably quaint about the Win NT/95-era desktop design. Everything was blocky, sure, but so well-defined and expressive. It tickles my brain in a pleasant way.)

128 MiB of RAM with NT 4? That must have been amazing (my machine that ran NT4 came with 32 MiB and I eventually upgraded it to 64 MiB).

The NT 3.x screenshot links seem to be broken.

I don't have a copy of Visual Studio 6. I had the student license to Visual Basic 5 and Visual C++ 5. But from the screenshot, it looks as if this is using the version of the copy protection check for ID keys was 'sum the digits, must be divisible by 7'. So 1111111 or 7777777 worked fine. As I recall, the first three digits were an org identifier and were not validated.

That is because Microsoft did not expect this to run at the crazy high resolution of 1280x1024

That's pretty surprising. My PC in 1996 had a 15" monitor that I ran at 1024x768 (it could do 1600x1200, but only at 43 Hz interlaced. I think it did 1280x1024 at 60 Hz, 1024x768 ran at 85 Hz). And that used the previous version of Visual Studio (when it was just a brand name for a bundle of largely unrelated products).

VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time.

Most of these were in Visual C++ 5 as well. Going to editing files in vim really felt like a step backwards.