🚀 go-pugleaf

>Exactly my point, NT is what MS wants people to buy, Win95 is a
>stepping stone.
>
>>Perhaps Win95 won't be preemptive but perhaps Win96 (or whatever) will.
>
>There won't be a Win96, unless Win95 slips past Dec.  NT is the
>upgrade for Win95.

That is what I have said from the beginning.  I just know though that NT will undergo a 
few more changes before it becomes the NT that MS wants people to go from Win95 to.  In 
its present state, there is a 30% chance of getting a dos game to run without sound and a 
60% chance of getting a windows game to work.  They would be stupid to have users go to 
NT at this point.



>Using modem while multitasking is *exactly* what many OS/2 users
>switch to OS/2 for!  I routinely do 14.4k download while
>multitasking without *any* problems.  E.g. I started The 7th Guest
>while reading someone is having problems with it, switched back
>and forth to respond, no problems. Tell my what problems you have,
>I will see if my system can handle who you are trying to do.

Perhaps the problem was that I was using Windows Communications apps while trying to run 
a dos game on top of it.  




>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
because Win95 has not even become commmercial yet.  Are they placing a
large bet the Win95 will make it as an OS?  Probably not.  But, if you
have been a loyal OS/2 user for a while, you will realize that it has
only been recently that it has gotten any games developed for it.  I
sometimes walk into computer software stores to ask what kind of software
they have for OS/2 and they ususally say... Well, we have OS/2 Warp.


>While you wait, I will be happily playing
>both DOS and OS/2 games, and I may have already got a few
>*multithreaded* OS/2 games (GalCiv, Avarice, Entrepretner, thanks
>to SDS) before Win95 is even available.  BTW, 0% of them will be
>compatible with Win95.

How many games can Stardock Systems make though?  Realistically, if they are
the only company making games for OS/2 as it has appeared to me that they are,
then OS/2 really does not have any support or chance to become a major
market contender for games.  I can already see how compilers and other 
development tools are becoming 32bit and will only compile for Win 32s 
(which will be dead soon) and Win95 or Windows NT.  This is going to be a major
problem for OS/2 unless they license the Windows 95 technology.  

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 
like Sim City (which is a few years old) but you can get them for
other systems too.  My point is that without OS/2 having a more 
significant market share than do MS OS's, there won't be much development
for it.  I am not saying that OS/2 will always have this lack of
market share just that at this point it does.  

>If on the slim chance that your prediction is correct, I will buy
>Win95 *then* (most bugs are probably patched by then).  What do I
>lose?  Nothing.

Do you honestly think that the chance is that slim?  Most people know
that NT is going to be the future OS... It has jumped across many 
platforms and now onto Power PC (OS/2 was supposed to do that quite
a while ago I thought).  MS is not going anywhere in terms of market
share.  And, you and I both know that there will be a huge amount of
games developed for Win95.  

>>>>DOS apps are improved compared to running them in DOS also as far as
>>>>I have seen.
>>>
>>>Not if you are running more than one at a time, a few Win95 beta
>>>testers posted that one DOS app will slow down the whole system.
>>
>>When could you EVER multitask games in DOS or Win3.x?  You never could!
>>It is true that Win95 multitasking of DOS is not very quick but it serves
>>its purpose.
>
>Huh?  My point is running ONE DOS app will slowdown the whole
>*Win95* system.  If that's good enough for you fine, I will stick
>with OS/2 which *can* multitask DOS apps *without* the whole
>system slowing down.

And you can't do that in Win95.  It just takes a little bit of
setting up to do.  But then again OS/2 never takes any setting up
to make DOS games work, does it?

John Marconi
UIUC Computer Science