Dec 3, 2025
Why WinQuake exists and how it works
When I took a look at the history of Quake binaries, they all made sense to me. quake.exe was the original release, able to run on DOS and Windows 95. Then came vquake.exe to support the hardware accelerated chip Vérité 1000. Later, glquake.exe generalized hardware acceleration to any vendor providing OpenGL drivers. And to revolutionize Internet deathmatch, id Software released QuakeWorld server and client ( qwsv.exe and qwcl.exe ).
However, I could not figure out the point of winquake.exe . Until now. Here is what I understood and a little bit of a dive into how it works.
Quake.exe performance
quake.exe runs on both DOS and Windows 95 but how well does it perform? A quick benchmark on my Pentium MMX 233MHz, Matrox Mystique PC (320x200 with 101 screen size) and sound on, showed the following numbers.
Configuration Framerate quake.exe started from DOS 48 fps quake.exe started from Windows 95 38 fps
So "framerate" is the beginning of an answer to justify the existence of WinQuake. quake.exe running from Windows 95 is roughly 25% slower than the same binary started from DOS. And that is to be expected. Windows 95 runs DOS applications in a virtual machine ("DOS BOX"), where memory access, interrupts, and signals are virtualized, which incurs overhead.
Another element of the answer comes from Quake Chunnel. quake.exe can access Windows 95 TCP/IP stack, but only via a convoluted tech from Mpath to bridge a "DOS BOX" to win32 dlls. By having a win32-only application, id Software had guaranteed direct access to winsock.dll .
Last but not least, id Software really wanted Quake to work on Windows NT. Despite their best efforts, the people at DJGPP could not make their DPMI client in quake.exe compatible with the NT Virtual DOS Machine (NTVDM).
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