Windows 95/98/ME/2000 ?

[fmsoftware]

I'm in the process of launching a casual 3D game. It's come to the point where I'm doing compatibilty testing. I was wondering if anyone had any statistics on what operating system their player's used.

What I would like to know is whether it would be worth buying versions of Windows 95, 98, ME & 2000 to test my game on. If there's only going to be a minority of users with these operating systems, would it be worth it?

The game is a 'play for 15 minutes' arcade game. I'm assuming most of my customers will have Windows XP. Surely if a person is buying games from the internet they will have a modern OS. Or am I being naïve?

[esmelon]

Site visitors statistic for some periods in January-February.


2391 79.36% Windows XP
253 8.40% Windows 2000
115 3.82% Unknown
105 3.48% Windows 98
41 1.36% Windows 2003
34 1.13% Linux
33 1.10% MacIntosh
20 0.66% Windows NT
14 0.46% Windows Vista
3 0.10% Mac_PowerPC
2 0.07% Windows 95
1 0.03% FreeBSD
1 0.03% Windows ME
3014 100%

[Nexic]

So far today:

Internet Explorer 6.0 - Windows XP 292 53.38%
Internet Explorer 7.0 - Windows XP 121 22.12%
Firefox 2.0.0.3 - Windows XP 58 10.60%
Internet Explorer 7.0 - Windows Vista 14 2.56%
Firefox 1.5.0.11 - Windows XP 14 2.56%
Opera 9.20 - Windows XP 7 1.28%
Internet Explorer 6.0 - Windows 2000 6 1.10%
Internet Explorer 6.0 - Windows 98 6 1.10%
Opera 9.10 - Windows XP 3 0.55%
Firefox 2.0.0.1 - Windows XP 2 0.37%

[jcottier]

You can drop win95.

Win98/Me are kind of the same OS, so you just need to test on win98.
For me, win98+Me totalise only 4% of my traffic.

If your game runs on win98, then you should be ok with win2K.

So, really you should mainly be sure it runs ok on XP (94% of my traffic).

JC

[fmsoftware]

Thank you for the stats and advice. :)
I'll do some testing myself and then use VSB labs service - £60 for testing on all those machines seems very good value to me.

[DFG]

I saw 3.5-5% Vista on my last log report, higher than I would have suspected. Going to get much larger as rumors Microsoft will make PC distributors drop XP in favor of Vista by the end of the year.

[fmsoftware]

My game runs on Vista but because it uses OpenGL it's runs in the D3D emulation mode. I don't know the current status of nVidia and ATI support for OpenGL on Vista.
Looks like my next game should be designed to use DirectX and OpenGL.

[wazoo]

My game runs on Vista but because it uses OpenGL it's runs in the D3D emulation mode. I don't know the current status of nVidia and ATI support for OpenGL on Vista.
Looks like my next game should be designed to use DirectX and OpenGL.

Not trying to drag this topic OT, but here's a whitepaper on the opengl.org site concerning OpenGL and Vista

http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9/

2 word summary? You're fine. (okay that's 3)