How To Obtain Microsoft WinG SDK and General Overview of WinG

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Although business applications such as word processors and spreadsheets have moved from MS-DOS to Windows, MS-DOS remains the operating system of choice for high-volume, high-performance, action games and innovative graphics applications for PCs. These applications have not made the transition to Windows because of restrictions placed on the programmer by GDI device independence, by the windowed environment, and by the inability of general graphics libraries to provide the necessary speed.

The display techniques used by high-performance graphics applications have two characteristics in common. First, the application hides the frame composition process by double buffering in software or hardware. Second, programmers use knowledge specific to the problem at hand to optimize their graphics routines in ways a general graphics library can't do.

Hiding frame composition eliminates flicker by presenting only completed frames to the user. Under MS-DOS, a VGA card can accomplish the display in hardware by page flipping or the buffer can reside in main memory that is copied to the screen. Some applications further optimize display access by copying only the areas of the buffer that have changed since the last frame, a process called dirty rectangle animation. Today, high-performance MS-DOS games use all of these techniques.

In short, most MS-DOS games programmers use knowledge specific to their application and their hardware to write optimized graphics routines. Until now, Windows programmers could not use such methods because GDI prevents access to device-specific surfaces, so programmers cannot draw directly onto the surface of a GDI device context.

WinG (pronounced "Win Gee") is an optimized library designed to enable these high-performance graphics techniques under Windows version 3.x, Win32s, Windows NT version 3.5, Windows 95, and future Windows releases.

WinG allows the programmer to create a GDI-compatible HBITMAP with a Device Independent Bitmap (DIB) as the drawing surface. Programmers can use GDI or their own code to draw onto this bitmap, then use WinG to transfer it quickly to the screen. WinG also provides halftoning APIs that use the standard Microsoft halftone palette to support simulation of true color on palette devices.

How to Obtain the Microsoft WinG SDK

WinG is not included as a part of Windows version 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows NT. In order to run applications that use WinG, you will either have to install it yourself (see below) or rely on a third-party application that uses WinG to install it as part of its setup process.

The following files are available for download from the Microsoft Download Center:
For additional information about how to download Microsoft Support files, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Microsoft scanned this file for viruses. Microsoft used the most current virus-detection software that was available on the date that the file was posted. The file is stored on security-enhanced servers that help to prevent any unauthorized changes to the file. This file contains the version 1.0 release of the WinG graphics libraries. Unzip the file into a temporary directory, and then run SETUP.EXE. The setup program will create a program group with icons for the samples and the WinG help file.

NOTE: Setup will also install a file called README.TXT that contains information on known bugs and limitations. For more up to date information on known problems or conflicts with WinG, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Please report bugs to this Internet email address: