About Windows 95 (Win95;Windows 4.00)

Backwards compatibility:
* DOS: almost full

DirectX:
* Shipped with DirectX 1.0
* DirectX 8.0a last to support

I was a DOS gamer when Windows 95 cam alone. There were problems with DOS games. Especially in meeting memory requirements of demanding DOS games. There were also minor performance issues with almost all games. However, the majority of them were quite 'playable' despite the difficulties. One could always reboot into 'DOS mode' which was could be configured as a per game option. This achieve nearly 100% perfect performance compared to DOS and was slightly more convenient that a reboot in real DOS.

This problem should be obvious to anyone who is even remotely familiar with their system.

Should be, but it isn't. Many DOS games listed ridiculously low memory requirements yet gave out or memory errors when run under on Windows 95. One needed to fiddle with settings and managers for XMS, EMS, HMA, and/or UMB. In extreme cases, one needed to change or fiddle with sound, mouse, or other hardware drivers or else do without the benefits of these hardwares when they played the game. One could expect to be typing cryptic commands into the autoexec.bat and config.sys files. I still remember having to type files=80 in CONFIG.SYS to make a certain game run, but another game would set it to 10 while the level editor for said game would set it to 20.

All part of being familiar with your system. It didn't require anything to be done that wasn't already given with the base OS. Fiddling with the memory settings for DOS games and such do not change the requirements, only what the OS gives it. Any performance issues are likely to come from people thinking the OS doesn't use anything. Pure DOS mode was available, but most of what it did was remove the Windows OS from eating CPU and memory from what the games got, and I'm currently unable to remember any games that definitely required it to run.

Also, even in real DOS people had config.sys set to give a boot menu that would have 2 or more different boot configurations (I had 4-5) that were used to run different games (though most ran on the "default" configuration with everything enabled).