So the "4G" stands for 4 gigabytes... that's funny, as at that time (early nineties) I bet no one could even imagine a humble PC having 4 GB of memory. That was the domain of supercomputers. And nowadays, even smartphones have more RAM than that...
Also, "Fun fact: The original Wolfenstein 3D engine, created by id Software, was developed using pure real mode". Well, that figures... if you still wanted your code to run on 16 bit CPUs (286 and below), you had to use real mode. That's also why, for several years, only the then-"AAA" games like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D or Tomb Raider used DOS extenders. Titles that were less demanding on the hardware (platformers and other 2D games) kept using real mode for quite some time longer.
Actually, I can add a fun fact of my own: when I started in software development in 2000, it was at a company developing Windows applications using Delphi - and at that time they were still keeping up compatibility with Windows 3.1, i.e. compiling in 16 bit mode. They finally switched to 32 bit soon after I joined, and I can't tell you what a relief that was. Although getting rid of the weird hacks in the source code that were made necessary by the constrained memory space of 16 bit applications took some more time...
Also, "Fun fact: The original Wolfenstein 3D engine, created by id Software, was developed using pure real mode". Well, that figures... if you still wanted your code to run on 16 bit CPUs (286 and below), you had to use real mode. That's also why, for several years, only the then-"AAA" games like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D or Tomb Raider used DOS extenders. Titles that were less demanding on the hardware (platformers and other 2D games) kept using real mode for quite some time longer.
Actually, I can add a fun fact of my own: when I started in software development in 2000, it was at a company developing Windows applications using Delphi - and at that time they were still keeping up compatibility with Windows 3.1, i.e. compiling in 16 bit mode. They finally switched to 32 bit soon after I joined, and I can't tell you what a relief that was. Although getting rid of the weird hacks in the source code that were made necessary by the constrained memory space of 16 bit applications took some more time...