The DirectX 2 SDK is composed of several interfaces that address and answer the performance issues of programming games and high-performance applications in the Windows 95 operating system:
·The Microsoft DirectDraw™ application programming interface. This accelerates hardware and software animation techniques by providing direct access to bitmaps in off-screen display memory as well as extremely fast access to the blitting and buffer-flipping capabilities of the hardware.
·The Microsoft DirectSound™ application programming interface. This enables hardware and software sound mixing and playback.
·The Microsoft DirectPlay™ application programming interface. This allows easy connectivity of games over a modem link or network.
·The Microsoft Direct3D™ application programming interface. This provides a high-level Retained-mode interface that allows applications to easily implement a complete 3D graphical system, and a low-level Immediate-mode interface that applications can use to take complete control over the rendering pipeline.
·The Microsoft DirectInput™ application programming interface. This provides joystick input capabilities to your game that are scalable to future Windows hardware input APIs and drivers.
·The Microsoft AutoPlay feature of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system. This lets your CD run an installation program or the game itself immediately upon insertion of the CD.
The last two features, DirectInput and AutoPlay, exist in Microsoft Win32® application programming interface and are not unique to the DirectX 2 SDK.