Chapter 38 -- Playing Games

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Chapter 38

Chances are you chose Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional for some set of reasons other than its suitability as a gaming platform. Because Windows 2000, like its predecessor Microsoft Windows NT 4, prevents applications from making direct access to your computer's hardware, this operating system disallows some of the programming methods that many older games written for the MS-DOS and Windows 9x platforms have employed.

But if you've dismissed the potential of Windows 2000 as a gaming platform, you might be in for a pleasant surprise. Thanks to Windows 2000 support for DirectX, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that facilitates faster communication between programs and hardware devices, you can expect software vendors to provide more and more high-performance multimedia games that run under your operating system.