🚀 go-pugleaf

Tom Pearce <no...@nompear.demon.co.uk> writes:

>I have read recently that IBM is writing an API so that Win9x programs
>can easily be recompiled for OS/2 by the programmers [...]

>[In] games, the user interface doesn't matter much. So why not just
>use plain old DOS instead? Games will run faster in DOS than in any
>multitasking system as it only has the one job to do, and anyway, I thought
>one of the 'great' things about win9x was that you could start up a DOS
>machine that completely gets rid of Win9x (good idea)...(for games, that is)
>so that they could run at their best/fastest! I'm sure that is what the
>developers are saying they will use (if they indeed are - I haven't heard
>of any).

No. You haven't been keeping up with the news in gaming magazines have
you? Future games such as Wing Commander IV, Warhammer, and Falcon 4
will be Win 95 native apps. DOS games (and indeed DOS itself) are in
their final days. There is a LOT of reasons why Win'95 is a better
gaming platform than DOS -- for one thing you don't have to worry if
your video or sound card is suppported by the game -- if Windows
supports it, the game supports it -- and you don't have to have eight or
ten differnt config.syses either!  And with the WinG graphics library,
it really isn't much slower than DOS.

While OS/2 offers many of the same benefits, (well, the current
graphics engine is dog slow in comparison to WinG, but this could be
fixed.) it simply hasn't been embraced by the development
community. You mention porting tools. Yes, but I doubt there will be
many Win95 games ported to OS/2 even if these porting tools do 100% of
the work (which they won't -- I've used similar tools for porting
Windows 3.1 applications to Motif, and still lots of effort is
required to get a working application). Developers simply don't see
OS/2 as a viable platform. Don't believe me? Try calling technical
support for any DOS game you having trouble running under OS/2. They
will invariably say "We don't support running our games under
OS/2". If they don't even bother to figure out the OS/2 settings for
their DOS programs, do you think they'd spend any time or effort
*porting* a program to OS/2?

I am neither an OS/2 or Win'95 zealot (and I've used both). But OS/2
users are deluding themselves if they think there will be more than a
handfull of native OS/2 games. OS/2's strength lies in its ability to
run DOS and Windows applications. But unless Win'95 support is added
(as was promised by IBM before they got Notes-happy, and which they
now say won't happen), the number of modern games that OS/2 will be
able to run in a year or two will be minimal.