🚀 go-pugleaf

Jonathan Badger (bad...@phylo.life.uiuc.edu) wrote:
> 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.

Even todays Win3.1 have that feature - API based video support.
The result is not good: games like 'Myst' keep asking for '256 color'
mode force me to restart windows to switch mode.  Driver quality may
cause more compatibility problem than memory managers in DOS.  Windows
itself use a big chunk of ram plus any backgroud programs like fax, leaving
limited memory available hence force memory hungry games like Wing
Commander go to the disk more often.  Try run Descent in a 4M Ram
machine and you can see what happen.  I expect any big Win95 game
require 16M Ram minimum, and also ask for e.g. "Sound Blaster Driver
v1.24 or higher, WinG 3.3 or higher, 3D API 2.11 etc".  Hacking
CONFIG.SYS is easier than driver hunting.  BTW OS/2 also have these
problems.

Only the 3D API and support of 3D accelerator card sounds promising.

           |  _  |                      Ka On Lee
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