New versions of operating systems often advertise backward-compatible features to entice previous-generation users to upgrade. When Windows 95 was released, Microsoft was so eager for users to upgrade that it added a special patch to run the popular game SimCity . According to former Microsoft programmer Joel Spolsky, Jon Ross, the developer of the Windows 3.x version of SimCity, admitted that he accidentally left a bug related to reading just freed memory. This bug has no effect on Windows 3.x and can run normally. But Windows 95 changed the way memory was allocated, which made SimCity unable to run. Microsoft wrote a special patch for this that will run the memory allocator in certain modes if it detects SimCity is running, so the game won’t crash.
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