Enlarge / Microsoft wanted people to have zero reasons not to upgrade to Windows 95. That meant making sure SimCity Classic worked, with some memory-reading work-arounds. (credit: Chris Hsia / Flickr )

It's still possible to learn a lot of interesting things about old operating systems. Sometimes, those things are already documented (on a blog post) that miraculously still exist. One such quirk showed up recently when someone noticed how Microsoft made sure that SimCity and other popular apps worked on Windows 95.

A recent tweet by @Kalyoshika highlights an excerpt from a blog post by Fog Creek Software co-founder, Stack Overflow co-creator, and longtime software blogger Joel Spolsky. The larger post is about chicken-and-egg OS/software appeal and demand . The part that caught the eye of a Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast co-host is how the Windows 3.1 version of SimCity worked on the Windows 95 system. Windows 95 merged MS-DOS and Windows apps, upgraded APIs from 16 to 32-bit, and was hyper-marketed . A popular app like SimCity , which sold more than 5 million copies, needed to work without a hitch.

Spolsky's post summarizes how SimCity became Windows-95-ready, as he heard it, without input from Maxis or user work-arounds.

Enlarge / It may look empty, but the original PlayStation Vr ecosystem contained many games that will never move forward. (credit: Kyle Orland)

A Sony executive confirmed Friday that the PlayStation VR 2 will not be backward-compatible with games developed for the original PlayStation VR.

Sid Shuman, senior director of content communications at Sony Interactive, asked Hideaki Nishino, senior vice president of platform experience at Sony, whether games for the original PSVR could be played on a PSVR2 kit on the Official PlayStation Podcast, episode 439 (his answer starts at 29:12).

"PSVR games are not compatible with PSVR2 because PSVR2 is designed to deliver a truly next-generation VR experience," Nishino said. Nishino listed a number of "much more advanced features" in the VR2, including new controllers with haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, advanced eye tracking, and 3-D audio. "That means developing games for PSVR2 requires a whole different approach than the original PSVR."