🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>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 
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 
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.


>>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 
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.

>>>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
>
>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.  
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.  



>>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.
>
>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 
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.


>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 
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.


>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.


>>>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?
>
>But then again, DOS never takes any setting up to make DOS games
>work, does it?
>
>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. 

John Marconi 
UIUC Computer Science