🚀 go-pugleaf

kk...@postoffice.utas.edu.au (Ng, Kai Koon) writes:

>In article <38n309$b...@mojo.eng.umd.edu> doc...@glue.umd.edu (John Sabean) writes:
>>Origin has been handling this techology.... What do I mean? Take 
>>WC Armada for example. 13 megs it takes up. This easily fits on 3 1/2"

How many 3.5"HD floppies?  Assuming a 1.5-to-1 compression ratio, we still
get roughly 7Mb of data (WCA is only 11Mb), which means at least 5 (let's
say 6) floppies.

>>disks and costs just as much to duplicate, perhaps cheaper.... (My

Let's say $1.25 for the CD and case, with far higher quality media so I don't
have to worry about whether B: is gonna be finnicky or not and decide a sector
is just slight off so it won't read it, or whether the disks were not properly
recorded for some reason.  Let's say $3 for the 6 floppies.  The recording
time for the CD should be remarkably fast compared to copying 6 floppies,
should it not?

>>option, but what kind of delays do you get playing it off the CD? I haven't

>I have tried it off the CD.  It is slightly slower than from the hard disk.  
>It's playable, but since I have the hard disk space, I'll continue to run it 
>off the HD.

To me, it seems like roughly triple to quadruple that of the delays due to 
hard drive access.  It's very noticeable - however WCA and other games let you 
install the entire game to hard disk so you don't get these delays.

>>is that Origin has been notorious for putting games on CD ROM and 
>>advertising them as "Playable off the CD" when doing so is so unbearbly

So?  Some games can be played off of the floppies they come on.  Do you
want to do this when you have a hard drive?  Obviously not.  Just because
it is playable off the CD doesn't mean it *must* be played off of CD.

It is *NOT* unbearable.  It *IS* noticeable but the access time is fast enough 
so that most of the time it's *really* slow is for a cinematic shot.

>>slow that only those that were low on HD space would ever do it! 

Which reminds me, is WC3 gonna be over 50Mb?  

>So far they are putting double speed drives as recommended for WC3.  So, if 
>you believe that, you won't need a triple speed drive YET.

Besides which, isn't quad-speed out (still at insane prices, but ...)?
By the time CDs get to quad or higher, at affordable prices, they will
be fast enough to compete relatively well with hard drives, especially if
a data buffer like SMARTDRV for CD-ROMs comes out.

A few points as to why software should come out on CD:
1.  You don't get dozens of floppies with possible read-write errors or
    tracks/sectors just slightly off or whatnot.
2.  I just got 2 games : WC Armada and Colonization.
    WCA is roughly 11.5Mb large, COL is 4.5.
    WCA took around 5 minutes to install on C:, COL took around 10.
3.  I generally am sick of hearing B: make thunk-thunk noises while
    reading from or writing to floppies.  Same with A:.

>Cheers >Ng, Kai Koon >University of Tasmania, Australia
>Electrical & Electronics Engineering >email : kk...@postoffice.utas.edu.au

					Michael Lewchuk
					lew...@cs.UAlberta.CA