🚀 go-pugleaf

In <3olve9$p...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>, mar...@ux5.cso.uiuc.edu (John Marconi) writes:
>
>>>>I look forward to your Win95 games which will get 90% of games'
>>>>market (I would be interested to see how MS force those DOS gamers
>>>>to buy Win95 though).
>>>
>>>It has already been announced that Falcon 4.0 which will be a major
>>                     ^^^^^^^^^
>>>upgrade from Falcon 3.0 will be Win95 ONLY.  This is fairly significant
>>
>>That's the key word here, "announced", still more vaporware.  As I
>>said, I will believe it when I see it.  Tell me about them when
>>you can buy them.
>
>Why would you think that this is vaporware?  I have seen pictures of the
>game about 4 or 5 months ago.  As of this point, all Win95 games have to

Announced but unrelease software *is by definition* vaporware.
E.g. Win95 screen shots have been seen at least a year ago now.

>be vaporware because it would be silly to sell them before the OS is out.
>And, in this case, there is only ONE OS/2 only game which is not vaporware

At least I have one, that's my point.

>being GalCiv.  All of the others have pics or problematic betas.  So, tell
>me all about the vast amounts of games coming to OS/2 when they arrive or
>are anounced.

Sure, no problem.  But please keep in mind that I am not the one
saying "OS/2 will get 90% of games market".  Having a few nice
game for it is a fine addition to the available DOS games.

>>>At this point, I have seen maybe 5 or 6 games in development
>>>specifically for OS/2.  I've tried GalCiv and it was pretty good.
>>>The point is though that I can count the number of developers for
>>>strictly OS/2 games on one hand.  Sure, there might be conversions
>>
>>So what?  I can also count the number of developers for *strictly*
>>Win95 games on one hand (perhaps even no hand, did those
>>developers said they won't do DOS anymore?).  You can just find a
>>new game annoucement here or there, but the companies are not
>>abandoning DOS.
>
>How about any company that produces Windows games?  I am sure that they
>will be very happy to move right on to programming Windows 95 games.  It

I am not quite sure, as they will be abandoning the current
millions of Win3.x users.  I will wait until most of them have
upgraded before jumping on, which takes a couple years at *least*.

>in fact will not be that hard to port old or new games to 95.  As for DOS
>games, sure they are still in production... companies are waiting to see
>how good Win95 will be.  Companies have seen OS/2 for years and there are
>barely any games to show for it.

Of course, until Warp, the user base of OS/2 is not big enough to
support commercial games nor did IBM take any effort to advertise
OS/2.  Some IBMer have taken a hostile view of somebody developing
games for their mission critical platform!  But things have
changed now, although I don't think everybody under the sun will
develop games for OS/2, but it's a viable game platform now.

>>>Do you honestly think that the chance is that slim?  Most people know
>>
>>Yes, I do think that the chance for Win95 games dominating
>>completely as DOS games do now is slim.  A sizable chunk is
>>possible (50-60%), but >90%? not likely.
>
>If you count all of the DOS and Windows game on the market now, there is
>probably around 99% market share.  This is because these two OS's are
>dominant.  I am saying that the dominant OS will get most of the games.

Most != 99%.  I highly doubt DOS/Win have 99% of games market,
what happened to the Mac?  I trust about 80% is closer.  And the
point is, even DOS/Win is dominant now, Mac is still a viable
platform.  In the same way, even if Win95 dominates, OS/2 will
still be a viable platform.  And porting from Win95 to OS/2 is
*much* easier than DOS/Win to OS/2, due the similarities in design
(flat application address, multithreading, etc).

>As long as Win95 dominates, I am willing to bet that Win95 games will
>dominate.  And, as far as I can tell, it is going to be a good year for
>Microsoft.

We will see, I say 1995 a bad year for MS.

>>>share.  And, you and I both know that there will be a huge amount of
>>>games developed for Win95.
>>
>>No, I don't know that there will be a huge amount of games
>>developed for Win95, I have yet to see even *one* that is more
>>than just a DOS port.  Perhaps you have a crystal ball showing you
>>the future, I don't have one.
>
>If the current state of OS/2 development of games does not change, Win95
>will have a huge amount of games for it in the future.  Certainly in a few

I don't think OS/2 games development will not change, IBM is
starting to push game developments in OS/2, released a game
development kits, more advertising, etc.

>years, no companies will develope for DOS anymore and I am sure that those
>game companies will not just die out of business.  They will most likely
>move on to Win95 if they haven't already.  There are hordes of people
>waiting to buy Win95 when it is released and there will be hordes of
>companies attempting to get new games out for Win 95.

More wishful thinking.  As I said, I will believe it *when* I see
it.  Even if (a big if) all the above is true, I can buy Win95
when it happens.  There is no point in buying an OS now so that I
can play games 1-2 years later, I'd rather buy the OS 1-2 years
later along with the games.

>>Any Win95 games available?  Even Win95 is not available!  What's
>>the point of talking about Win95?  I can buy Win95 *if* it becomes
>>dominant.  I don't get any advantage buying Win95 this year (or
>>the next) except the satisfaction of being an unwilling beta
>>tester for MS.  You and I (and most gamers) know that 1.0 releases
>>are buggy, at least wait for the first patch before buying.
>
>I hardly think that this is true by now.  There are roughly 500,000 beta
>testers now which is the largest testing program for a piece of software

Nope, not beta testers.  That 50k copies is called "Preview", it's
for you to *evaluate* Win95, not for you to give bug reports.

>ever.  I believe that there will be very few bugs by the release of the
>software.  Most bugs have probably already been found by those beta
>testers.  These are not just run of the mill testers though, these are
>testers who pay $32 to hack the crap out of the system to find problems.
>I am sure it won't be as buggy as you think.

Many of those tester are not going to "hack the crap out of the
system to find problems", most of them will just install it, play
around with it, and that's it.  Only people who are *paid* to do
so will "hack the crap out of the system to find problems", people
*paying* for the beta is for a "first look".

>>I use OS/2 now, because it's the best (IMHO) *now*, there are
>>games (both DOS and OS/2) available *now* that I can play.  When
>>OS/2 died and Win95 becomes dominant, I will buy it then to play
>>those *available* games, and I lose nothing in the process.
>
>Fine, now OS/2 is the best for games and I will agree with you.  But, to
>me at least, the future for OS/2 looks bleak.  I can't realistically see
>them gaining any sort of dominance in the market and don't think that
>there will be nearly as many OS/2 only games as Win95 games.  I don't
>understand why a company would produce games for a lesser audience.

Even if it's true, fine, I will switch to Win95 *if* and *when*
OS/2 is not longer the best for me.  But I highly doubt if it will
happen, and it's not a concern to me now.

>>The point is it takes *less* work in OS/2 to set up a game than
>>DOS: no bootdisk, no messing around to get that little bit more
>>conventional memory (I get 638704 bytes of conventional memory in
>>OS/2's DOS box by just loading DOS high), I can even run a game
>>that requires *more* memory than I physically have.  And once set
>>up, I can run it (and multitask) any time without rebooting.
>
>That is not really true though.  Have you ever gotten Under a Killing
>Moon to work in OS/2?  There are games that do not work for OS/2 and you
>have to reboot anyway.  In Dos, the worst that you have to do is get QEMM,
>and reboot if a program doesn't like memory managers.

In DOS, you almost always have to reboot to play a game and then
reboot after it.  In OS/2, the worst case is reboot to DOS to play
the game and boot back to OS/2 later, looks similar to me.  BTW, I
don't have UKM, I did played XCOM(CD), Arena, Star Trail(CD), AOE,
LOL, 7th Guest and Descent in OS/2 tho' (and of course GalCiv).

---
Oliver Chung
<khc...@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu>                 __  __    _
+Department of Physics, The Ohio State University+  |  |(__' /`_)
+----------> My opinions are my own <------------+  |__|.__)/ /__