Give Microsoft Some Credit

Pre Win 95,

Running any games software on a PC, was a total and utter nightmare

Is not now. (Not even in the same league of nightmares)

I imagine that most of the pre 95 users here, used an ST or an AMIGA in preferance to a PC for games.

I'd never even used a PC until I got a job as a games tester at Gremlin in 1998. I had an A1200, and an A500 before that.

Anyhoo...

People assume that because Microsoft are no longer supporting Win98, that all our software will magically stop working on it. It won't. What worked yesterday, will work tomorrow.

We have to move on, though. You can't maintain backward compatibility forever without hindering your own progress.

I had config sys offer me multiple boot options (e.g. NO EMS, NO CD, NO MOUSE etc) and then finally DOS booted up to a menu I made with a batch file. Then just typeing numbers and pressing enter would load my game :-) It was the same thing I did on the Amiga except it didn't need multiple boots (unless you needed and old kickstart)

I've never had so many problems with games running as Im having now.
DOS was a blissful enviroment where everything I ran just worked.

Anyhow, I don't think Microsoft needs anymore credits, they've already got plenty.

> It won't. What worked yesterday, will work tomorrow.

Except when using NT or XP, in which case many things worked yesterday but are totally buggered today.

It took me about 10 years before I was able to finally complete Ultima VII:PartII Serpent Isle. It was a DOS game, but with notoriously high memory requirements. When I upgraded my PC the soundcard driver pushed the mem use too high and also the game never workedin Windows of course. Finally I got it working in DOSBOX last year and finished it off. Awesome game.

"Except when using NT or XP, in which case many things worked yesterday but are totally buggered today. "
Yeah, he's talking about Win98. If it worked in Win98 yesterday, it will work tomorrow. But, please, continue your multi-thread Microsoft slam. I'm sure it feels good.

>It took me about 10 years before I was able to finally
>complete Ultima VII:PartII Serpent Isle. It was a DOS
>game, but with notoriously high memory requirements. When
>I upgraded my PC the soundcard driver pushed the mem use
>too high and also the game never workedin Windows of
>course. Finally I got it working in DOSBOX last year and
>finished it off. Awesome game.

You should have installed PC-DOS 7, and used the memory configuration tool... Best I've ever seen when it comes to squeezing out the last of the 640K.


Andy

oh well. I was pretty damn good at squeezing the best out of MS-DOS 6.22. People used to hire me to get their games working!

lol @ Grey. Thats because it was a nightmare

DOS was an excellent gamimg platform.
It was fun tweaking the autoexec.bat & config.sys to see how much base memory you could get out of the initial 640k and how much you could squeeze into the UMB's.

sure we could all tweak DOS but the average game player could not in any shape form or fashion. That's why they bought consoles.

As would any sensible person.

"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all his customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who by peddling second-hand, second-rate technology, led them all into it in the first place." - Douglas Adams 1995

Because if anyone was an expert on computers, it was Douglas Adams.

Yeah, he was actually. Personal friend of both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

By the way, Vista is being pushed back even further. I guess compared to Microsoft BRLs track record is starting to look pretty good.

SLAM DUNK!

That was actually quite funny.

You sure? Adams making quotes like the above, it doesn't sound like it. Must've been alot of awkward silences at dinner parties held at Gates Towers. :P

Anyway, how does being a friend of Bill Gates make Douglas Adams an expert? Osmosis?

I don't like osmosis. I don't like any musical collaborations between Noel Gallagher and Donny Osmond.

..hmmm...my views on microsoft and PC's are not healthy,
and would result in a forum ban...so ill jst watch ;)

Yeah it was called MS-DOS after all.....

*shudder*

Silly name. I was forever getting it mixed up with this:

Who cares if Douglas Adams was a computer expert? It doesn't matter one bit, what he said was true and everybody can see it.

Sometimes M$ haters go too far but recently the M$ supporters have been beating them for BS. Recently people seem to be touting Gates as some genius who is the reason why an ever increasing number of people have computers. Am I the only person who remembers before PC's were the dominant system? I seem to remember many computers before PC's and as time went along more and more people had one!

One of these was the Amiga, which in many ways, both hardware and software, was not surpassed until the end of the nineties, 5-6 years after the Amiga had died and stopped officially advancing. Some Workbench features have still yet to see the light of day on an M$ operating system well over a decade later!

I was about 10 yrs old and the teacher brought in a big box of discs with DOS writen on it.
Back then DOS was slang for 'having a good time' so we were laughing at the teacher holding this box... ha ha haa

H&K you are total wrong.
I have pc since 86. The only problem I had was that the games was running together with technology.( like todays days). Sure you had to learn some stuff for mem or sound or video but I was able to do them as a child.
One bad thing was that you had to buy staff that will be good for gaming. For example sound blaster compartible...
But the real Nightmare ( not the lazy one of Dos ) came with Windows 95. MS was saying that it will be good for the developers as they will not have to support a big list of drivers. But as you know this was not the overall idea. The idea of ms was to force PC users to buy an expensive package.
I still waiting for the real windows. For the windows OS. I still wand to be able to buy what I wand. How needs Media Player or IE or MSMeeting or ... And if you don't know your are giving money for all this stuff when you are buying windows.
The only Credits goes for the organisetion of drivers( the good one but it was going to be esear with a protocol or an iso) and for selling programs only as a package and not separeted.

I blame Intel and IBM they were big enought to write an OS they never had the need of MS...

I was a pc boy since 286 ... I think Win95 was the worst thing I've ever seen (getting games to run on Dos was so much simpler. Just make a genuine bat file that holds several different memory - himem configs for your games and have a boot config loader and you were happy) ...
But at least they learnt their lesson and brought win98 and especially win98SE which were the best Win OS till XP (ok Win2k with SP2 was acceptable as well. WinME was a large disk of useless trash. Needed to reinstall it once a week because it was superior in BSODing)

I've the evidence of it that it does stop working on my WinXP computer. Everything of Win95 and before that will simply not start up. Things of before WinXP does either not work at all or with great problems.

"I blame Intel and IBM they were big enought to write an OS they never had the need of MS..."
IBM had their shot. It was called OS/2. They were sent home.

Anyone want to buy an un-opened, boxed copy of OS/2 Warp? :P

P.S. No, I wasn't fool enough to purchase this - it was sent to be gratis, in the hope I'd get into developing apps for it, presumably. Some hope. :P

i'll do you 2 or 3 better chris...


1- an original shrink wrapped Digital Research Gem







2- a shrinkwrapped copy of DesqView...




3- and my most prized possesion :) a boxed copy of Windows 1.0




boy... those were the good ole days...

:)

for anyone interested in memorabilia... and for those too young, but who would like to see all the fun they missed, visit this site--> http://toastytech.com/guis/guitimeline2.html


--Mike

Well, looking at that win v1.0 screenshot, I think we should all be happy with the modern Op Systems we have today...

Wait, "all be happy"? What was I thinking. :P

I still prefer Workbench :)

M$ Licensed MS-DOS from Sun microsystems then sold it to IBM, then bought the full rights from Sun. DOS was brilliant but everything went wrong when they merged windows with DOS (Win95) it should have stayed as seperate products.

Because, much like Apple, IBM believed that having a better product mattered.

Microsoft bought it (QDOS, Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products for 50K USD, and licensed it (non-exclusively) to IBM.

FYI, writing "M$" makes you look like you're writing from your parents basement in Wisconsin.

OOOH! Some people are just tooooo coooool!

So does using FYI, whatever that means

Haven't the games been running much faster on dos than on win95?

And btw. boot your machine with a dos disk and see how it feels with 3 gigahertz O_O

FYI is a very convenient shortcut for writing 'for your information'. M$ is actually harder to type than MS, so therefore... what Warren said.

dos on a 3ghz is lightning fast :) (tried it with Dos6.22) :)