For a quick fix: `font-variant-ligatures: none;` on body or similar.

For users: paste the following in console

  document.body.style.setProperty('font-variant-ligatures','none','important');

I use NoScript and only got them after enabling JS for the blog page

I have this as !important in a global userStyle for code, pre, kbd, samp elements.

Infocom was bought by Activision, ActivisionBlizzard was bought by Microsoft.

whoa til microsoft owns blizzard.

You're one of today's lucky 10,000. It was huge news at the time. The FTC considered not allowing it and the acquisition got delayed for months while back and forth public debate raged.

Easy to forget all the big moves that happened recently, especially since there haven't been (afaict) any major changes to service. I forgot the other day that Sony had bought Bungie, though it'd be pretty memorable if Sony announced Destiny 3 as a PS5 timed exclusive.

Massive media/telecom/tech companies get passed around between other massive media/telecom/tech companies so much that regardless of how much you saw the news at the time, a couple of years later it's tough to remember "Now who is it that owns Warner Bros. currently? AOL? AT&T? Netflix? The sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia?"

And Sierra. It would be amazing if MS released the source code to some of Sierra classic Hi-Res/AGI/SCI games, or the engines themselves.

IIRC, Al Lowe had retained copies of source code from the early Sierra days, and was planning to release some of it publicly a few years ago, but Activision shut him down. Maybe MS would be willing to reconsider that now that they're pursuing historical preservation.

Space Quest IV!!!

yeah i think this is totally reasonable.

Microsoft owns lots of studios, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Gaming_studi...

Hence why when people think it is only a XBox console and nothing else, couldn't be more wrong.

Author here -- previous discussions/blog posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313577

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31112273

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37787161

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38810782

I specifically checked if DirectInput from DirectX 5 already supports/provides USB HID devices, and it does! Granted, even then it was unlikely to encounter 8 USB devices, let alone HID devices in particular.

Because I felt like it :) Also works for multiple versions/patchlevels.

But yeah, with the info provided it should be patchable. It's a `push esi` though, where esi has to stay 0 for a few further usages, so it's a bit more than a one-byte patch. It also wouldn't fully resolve the OOB write in the rare case where you _do_ have 9+ game controllers connected.

Usually dgVoodoo handles most of the games (that don't have actual bugs like this game) fairly well.

Otherwise, 86Box is a pretty good full-system emulator for everything up to the early 3D era.

As for DRM, there's various ways around it of course :)

> am I right in thinking the DirectX library only exports a single function and _everything_ else is through DX interfaces

Yup! That's why I didn't have to create a gazillion passthrough functions.

The original DLL in my modern Windows installation has these 8 exports:

    DirectInputCreateA
    DirectInputCreateEx
    DirectInputCreateW
    DllCanUnloadNow
    DllGetClassObject
    DllRegisterServer
    DllUnregisterServer

The game only calls DirectInputCreateA, and the rest happens via the COM object that that function creates.

Author here -- given that r9x is also my project it wasn't entirely random :^)

This is pretty amazing, and I'm surprised in a sense by how few workarounds you've had to implement. It makes me wonder what Windows would look like if we had Win2K or Win7 with today's system APIs (for high DPI, increased security etc.)

I know Windows has made great strides in security, but I deeply miss the old Windows and this really hits home about how _little_ has fundamentally changed, or rather, how much the continuance of these APIs means today's Windows could be like old Windows, if MS wanted.

I came across Windhawk a couple of days ago here on HN, a system to patch Windows to look and behave more old-style; wow.

AFAIK they are all backed up. For the blogpost I used the DX5 SDK docs, DX7 SDK docs, and the MSDN Library from VS2005 (last version to include 9x information).

The VS2008 version purged all API information regarding pre-Windows 2000.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B#Histo..., the last version to support Win3.1 is VC++ 1.52 (which was shipped with VC++ up to version 4).

Unless you mean NT3.1 of course :^)

I sit corrected. use VS4, also from archive.org, same serial. produced binaries will also work on win11