🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3oo24a$l...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>, mar...@ux5.cso.uiuc.edu (John Marconi) says:
>I don't know, I will believe it when I see it happen.  It sounds like
>those companies might want to add on another 500,000 users of their
>games under OS/2.  But, don't you keep saying that IBM wants to keep
>OS/2 around for businesses and mainframes?  We will see how well IBM
>stays dedicated to the average consumer.

For any operating system to stay around, it needs to establish a base
of users...  many people are buying computers and using the same
software at home as work and vice-versa.  By targeting the home, they
can get IS' for companies to implement it.

>This tends to be a problem for OS's that don't like to be set up
>correctly by teh Boot Manager.  As I remeber, don't you need to set
>up a small partition for the Boot Manager anyway?  This would be a
>pain for most people having to backup their drives, partition them 
>and then reformat them.  If IBM wants the real mass market, they
>need to make the system as easy to configure as possible.

There are shareware utilities that can resize partitions, so this may
not be too much of a problem.

>Are you serious!?  I think that most companies are planning to pursue
>gaming over networks.  If you have ever played Doom over a network and
>killed a few of your friends you know what I am talking about.  Networks
>for games are becoming vital.  Presently, fast modems just don't cut it
>when you need to send large amounts of data such as in Doom.  Many 
>companies are starting to make strategy games that are play be email.  And
>the soon to be released Civ Net is enhanced Civilization over a network.
>If you don't see networking as related to games you need to look again and
>try some games that use it.

Networking is becoming more common, true, but not many people have it
in there homes...  A lot of these network games are played at work, at
computer labs at the local college or university, etc.  Windows 95 isn't
the catch-all solution to networking, either.  It can't do Personal
NetWare and using Novell's NDS Client crashes the machine.  There are
several beta testers (not Preview customers) here that receive new
builds every week or so, something that Previewers do not get.  The
beta is not as stable one would think; every machine with Windows 95
either crashes or needs to be rebooted every couple of days.  Compared
to OS/2, this is miserable -- I've had my machine up for a month without
any problems before.

I don't think that many companies will port their games to Windows 95
right away because of the amount of problems that can occur.  Games are
not always the robust programs that we would like them to be.  What
happens when you have it running in a system that tries to multitask it?
The programmers would need to find a way to speed up the code without
resorting to any tricks that work fine in a single-tasking DOS.  What
about the number of drivers and DLL's that take up conventional memory?
Even in Windows 95, conventional memory still can cause havoc.

William Hutton
University of Colorado, Division of Continuing Education