WinG

In computing, WinG (pronounced Win Gee) is an application programming interface that was designed to provide faster graphics performance on Windows 3.x operating environments, and was initially positioned as a way to help game developers more easily port their DOS games to Microsoft Windows, although it 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. Obviously performance of such routines varied across drivers. 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.