🚀 go-pugleaf

In <3omb8q$1...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>, mar...@ux5.cso.uiuc.edu (John Marconi) writes:

I apologize to other gamers if this is becoming tiring for you, I
will move to email after this unless major mis-information about
OS/2 is concerned (such as IBM is going to drop OS/2).

[deleted]
>
>>Most != 99%.  I highly doubt DOS/Win have 99% of games market,
>>what happened to the Mac?  I trust about 80% is closer.  And the
>>point is, even DOS/Win is dominant now, Mac is still a viable
>>platform.  In the same way, even if Win95 dominates, OS/2 will
>>still be a viable platform.  And porting from Win95 to OS/2 is
>>*much* easier than DOS/Win to OS/2, due the similarities in design
>>(flat application address, multithreading, etc).
>
>
>Most == 99% when you are talking about PC games and not including Mac.
>Mac is viable, but that isn't where the war is about to begin.  For
>anyone with an IBM PC, the choice is between Win95 and OS/2.  OS/2 is


For anyone buying a home computer, the choice is between IBM PC
and Mac (and some others, but I will omit them for simplicity).  I
don't see Mac dying off simply because PC is the dominant
platform.  Similar situation for Win95 & OS/2, one won't die off
simply because the other is dominant.




>viable presently, but, if Win95 takes over (like MS wants), then IBM
>might just give up on OS/2.  I have heard some reports of this happening

This is one thing I firmly believe won't happen.  The simple
reason is that OS/2 is a strategic product for IBM, e.g. They need
to have their *own* PC OS for those PC connected the their
mainframes (big bucks).  And there are a lot of banks and ATM
machines running OS/2, IBM can't just "drop" OS/2 like that.  They
will support OS/2 even if they (and their big corperate clients)
are the only people using it.

>in magazines.  The porting problem might not even be an issue though.

Those mags have been predicting the death of OS/2 for literally
years, at least since around the release of NT (the ex-OS/2-
killer).  They say the same now when Win95 (the current OS/2-
killer) is about to be released.  And they will no doubt say the
same this time next year when MS starts to hype Cairo (the next
OS/2-killer).  When you trace the source of these "predictions",
most likely they are just repeating things from other mags.  The
recent one seems to even come from a MS rep!  And IBM have send a
not so polite letter refuting those "predictions" AFAI remember.

But more importantly, back to ***games*** below...

>How long did it take for Sim City to come out for OS/2?  A lot of
>companies want to develope for Win95 and NT and hardly want to waste
>any time developing for OS/2.  Porting may be easier from Win95 - OS/2
>than from DOS - OS/2 but I hardly think it will be easy.

One company (I forgot which one) reported that porting from Win95
to OS/2 takes 1/5 of the time needed to develop the product.  And
that's an application program where most time is spend on the
actual codes, not a game where time are spend on making beautiful
graphics and sound effects (both are by nature portable already).
Using a 2 year estimate as the time needed for a game, 1/5 of it
is just about 5 months.  Spend 5 months and you reach a roughly 8+
million market (probably more by the end of the year), sounds like
a good deal to me.

>>In DOS, you almost always have to reboot to play a game and then
>>reboot after it.  In OS/2, the worst case is reboot to DOS to play
>>the game and boot back to OS/2 later, looks similar to me.  BTW, I
>
>I don't know what version of DOS you are running, but I had to reboot
>DOS only for wierd games such as Ultima 7 or Comanche which don't like
>memory managers. I have dozens of other games that all work correctly

Not if you use your machine for more than games.  Having a cache
taking up 4M in a 8M machine means that you need to reboot (at
least that's what I needed when I still use DOS a year or two ago)
to resize (or even remove) the cache to run anything that wants
more memory.

>on one boot.  Anyway, booting to DOS under OS/2 is a very risky thing in
>my encounters.  I once booted to DOS, installed 200 megs on the drive
>with OS/2 installed on it, and booted back to OS/2.  My OS/2 would not
>find any files it was using previously giving me shared space errors.
>Sometimes, OS/2 would get back to its normal desktop and just stop.  The

My advice to new OS/2 users:  DON'T USE DUALBOOT, use Boot
Manager.  Keeping the OS/2 system files in a FAT partition where
DOS can mess with is a BAD IDEA.

>dual boot for OS/2 needs  a lot of work.  In DOS, you just press reset
>and everything is great.

Not if you have a cache with lazywrite on.

[About no built-in networking (not related to games) deleted]

Warp Connect is the version for networking, but I don't think this
will interest other gamers.

---
Oliver Chung
<khc...@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu>                 __  __    _
+Department of Physics, The Ohio State University+  |  |(__' /`_)
+----------> My opinions are my own <------------+  |__|.__)/ /__