Windows® 98 Unleashed

Windows 98 and Multimedia

Over the years, advances in multimedia software technology have coincided with advances in multimedia hardware technology. Graphics accelerator boards, 16-bit audio cards, increasingly fast CD-ROM drives, video capture cards, and local bus technologies all served to make the PC an attractive multimedia platform.

However, Windows-based multimedia suffered from two glaring problems:

• All this new hardware was still difficult to set up, thanks to the rigors of setting IRQs and other configuration parameters.

• Except for the basic multimedia subsystem included in Windows 3.1, Microsoft relied on third-party developers, OEMs, and end-users to implement, distribute, and install new features.

Windows 95 solved these problems by ...