Question
Problems with dos games in windows 95?
Answer
The 32-bit File Access was necessary for the long file names feature introduced with Windows 95 through the use of the VFAT file system. It was available to both Windows programs and MS-DOS programs started from Windows (they had to be adapted slightly, since accessing long file names required using larger pathname buffers and hence different system calls). Competing DOS-compatible operating systems needed an upgrade to be able to see these names. Using older versions of DOS utilities to manipulate files meant that the long names were not visible and would be lost if files were copied or moved around. During a Windows 95 automatic upgrade of an older Windows 3.1 system, DOS and third-party disk utilities which could destroy long file names were identified and made unavailable (Microsoft Anti-Virus for Windows indicated that the upgrade program was itself a computer virus). If Windows 95 was started in DOS mode, e.g. for running DOS games, low-level access to disks was locked out. If the need arose to depend on disk utilities that do not recognize long file names, such as MS-DOS 6.22's defrag utility, a program was provided on the CD-ROM called LFNBACK for backup and restoration of long file names. The program is in the \ADMIN\APPTOOLS\LFNBACK directory of the Windows 95 CD-ROM.
— Source: Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)