DOS Games Discussion

[Wally]

Vista is not ready for the market yet.

Its far too early, but knowing microsoft all their OS's come with bugs etc first time and they get slack and only release 2 service packs for each computer.

Now for Xp there are say 30 updates after XP SP2 is installed and they end up being 300mb all together, then there is Office which is around 30 - 40mb.

Vista may look nice, but it feels horrid and its all over the place. Microsoft changed it too much, they go too far and make it the worst resource hogging OS ever.

If you go to buy an low end computer it will come with vista, it will suck from day one (believe me they do). I bought one for a client, they think its alright (of course they have no idea). It takes forever to load up (around 5 mins at least) and its shoddy)


Mac OS X or Linux seem the only way to go these days, i mean dosbox can run dos games on any of these machines and of course why do we need a computer to run 3d games. I thought Windows for meant for Serious Video Conferencing

If you are considering it, don't get an Xbox 360. play your games on that

[ImperfectSense]

It's funny to hear people complain about how long it takes to get to say... notepad, in Vista. This is a great example of people not educating themselves about a product.

Vista in many ways has a dual identity. If you go into Vista expecting to see an evolution of XP, that is all you will get. In most ways, it probably seems identical, with the same hunt-and-peck to get to notepad, the same emphasis of appearance over functionality, the same clunky controls and inefficient design.

However, this is not what Vista truly is, this is really the "alternate" way of using this operating system. Microsoft had to keep things basically the same, otherwise we'd all be complaining that we couldn't figure out how to do anything. But if you learn a little about Vista, you'll be amazed at how much has changed "under the hood".

As an example, to get to notepad, you only need 1 click. Don't believe me? Think I'm referring to a quicklaunch icon? Guess again... Those of you who have Vista, click on the Start button, then type "notepad" and hit enter. No need to click in the search box, it knows what you intend Now, if you've never launched notepad that way before, or if you haven't allowed Vista to fully index your hard drive, that might take a second. But next time, it won't, because Vista will remember Now, let's try it again, this time, just click Start, then type "no" and hit enter. Now, depending on what other software you have installed... that SHOULD have opened notepad again. Pretty good, huh? 1 click and 3 keystrokes to get to notepad. And yes, this works on 3rd party software. Yes, it also works to find documents. In fact, it will even work to find text WITHIN a document. And as long as you let Vista index everything, speeds are excellent.

Now, performance. I will admit that Vista does use a lot of resources. But there are 2 factors that I think are important. #1, as you've seen above, it does important, useful things with the resources it uses. #2, it is VERY good at SHARING those resources when necessary, most of what it's doing in the background will be suspended if an application requires it. This still means you need more than 512mb of ram to happily run Vista, but the same was true of XP, and if you compare Vista's capabilities with XP's, it clearly is a superior user of resources. Besides, right now, computer parts are so cheap, you can build a truly excellent PC for well under $500, one that can handle all the games that are out right now. So, if you buy some cheapo store-bought machine and it sucks with Vista, either blame yourself for being cheap, or blame the manufacturer for really screwing you with a terrible machine

And btw, I'm in no way saying that that handy little search box is the only improvement in Vista.. it's just the example I chose based on someone's comments earlier in this thread. Take the time to go educate yourself about Vista, go to MS's product website, read the Vista Team Blog, etc... it's built on Server 2003 code, as opposed to NT like 2k and XP were. This means that for the first time in a decade, MS got to start from scratch with a desktop OS. Yes, they emulated Mac OSX in many ways, they also emulated linux in many ways. They took the best ideas they could find, wherever those ideas were, and put them in an OS that really does cover all it's bases.

The 2 main factors that have killed Vista in the public's eye: hardware vendors selling the same machine they've been selling for the past 3 years, despite the sharp decline in memory costs and the huge increase in cpu performance.... and the fact that Vista, from a marketing perspective, couldn't FORCE users to change how they do things, and so had to look roughly the same as XP, and had to still work the same as XP, even though it's intended to be an entirely different animal (and can be, if you learn how).

I've personally been running Vista for over 2 years, I started during the Beta on a Athlon XP machine, then switched to an AMD64 machine before there were ANY drivers out for it... and nVidia never did get finalized drivers out for all my stuff until just a few months ago. I run tons of classic dos/win3.1/win95 games on it, as well as all the newest and best. I ran beta Vista with beta Office 2007, beta Virtual PC 2007, beta OneCare, beta Messenger, beta Live Mail.... etc. Throughout all of that, and all of the past 2 years, only 1 scenario ever caused a BSOD on my machine. That was a bad beta harddrive driver. Every other error or problem my machine has had (and yes, there have been plenty)... was recovered by Vista, without losing the state of my OS or any of my running applications. Most notably, if my graphics card driver fails, that's an instant BSOD in XP, and chances are the BSOD error will be too vague for you to figure it out. In Vista, when my graphics card driver (beta) failed, my screen went black, then 3 seconds later came back up as if nothing happened, and a little box would pop up saying "Windows Vista has recovered from a serious error, your graphics card driver has stopped, it has been restarted". Any software problems I have (such as Nero Burning Rom crashing because it's not Vista compatible yet), MS gathers information about the crashes, contacts the developer, and then sends me a problem solution. Same sorta thing was supposed to happen with error reports on XP, but I never did get any fixes from those... but on Vista, I've gotten resolutions to 90% of my problems this way.

So, enough of that, I think those of you with an open mind will go check it out with a fresh attitude, and those of you who like XP (wait... is it even POSSIBLE to "like" XP?) will stick with that until you can't anymore

[Larry Laffer]

Ah, yes, educate oneself about how vista works! Yes! The oh-so-many advantages a full-blown Vista has? Yes, yes, gotta love them!


And yes the all mighty command-search-start menu! Yes, of course that is a magnificently bodacious thing! Yes!

MICROSOFT IS GREAT! PeePeL!

[wardrich]

I can't wait to see people with like terrabyte hard drives trying that one-click method to find apps. I can only assume it would take a few years for it to go thru and find the program you want. Wonderful idea.

Now, what if you forget the name of the app which you want to run? That start menu SUCKS

[dosraider]

Now, ImperfectSense, that was a whole read.
Nice post. Really.

Still remains the question why you would need Vista to run notepad on it, works still much better in W3.11, but agreed, that's nitpicking.

Another question that arises is if you're gonna convert much people on an abandonware site, I may hope you could copy/paste that post from another tech site you're on or so (note: I don't say you ain't the writer of it).

BTW: I also have Vista, even in different flavors, 32-64, severeal kinds, and I must say that on some points you have a eeuuurh point.
But Xp is still much better, maybe Vista will grow enough to be XP's equivalent some day, but it isn't now. Far from even.

And last but not least:
Welcome to our forum, ImperfectSense.

[nastypoisonspikes]

I like Vista a lot. I can't go back to XP.

The people spouting Tux propaganda are just envious of people with computers powerful enough to run it.

[dosraider]

The problem is not so much Vista itself, it's to find good working drivers for the hardware.

One example:
My son bought a Vista lappy (ACER), runs pretty good.
T'll we wanted internet conn, seems we had to buy a new ADSL router, 'cause the older one ( *1 year old* FTW *) had not one single Vista comp driver. Even the new one had to be installed/configured manually, the auto install didn't work.
Agreed, that's the fault of Belgacom, the seller of the router (and also his ISP skynet, that's Belgacom too).
Nevertheless it is a flaw.

Second example: my own USB2 ADSL modem, same story.
W95,W98,W2K,XP: no problems.( Works even in MSDos!!)
Vista: N.O.P.E.. Nothing to begin with, I had to buy a new one, same story, the auto install: not working, install manually.

Even if Vista is not directly to blame for that, Vista IS related to the problem.

Several older webcams also won't work under Vista .... and so on.

That's how people see it, a new OS with a lack of driver support, giving problems.
Is MS to blame? Yes and no, they could have implemented a better NT-XP compability, would had solve a lot of driver problems and given the devs time to adapt their drivers.

And before you ask it: NO, the XP comp tab wasn't usefull, not at all.

[wardrich]

Also, what about all the DRM in vista?

[nastypoisonspikes]

Here's a shocking truth: Vista doesn't actually automatically DRM every document and piece of media of that you put on your computer and try to make you buy licenses for everything. Don't blame Microsoft for DRM, blame the media companies: they're the ones responsible for it existing.

Seriously, most of this is just bullshit hype that almost everyone has been pushing for some reason. No, it's not a huge magical update to Windows over XP, but it has some cool features and it sure as hell looks better. The only problem I've had with Vista is that my crappy 10 year old printer isn't immediately compatible; I don't know if I'll ever be able to fix that, I haven't gotten around to troubleshooting it.

If you're buying new hardware, Vista is a awesome. But if you want to stick with the same box you've had since 1993, Vista probably just isn't for you.

[wardrich]

[ImperfectSense]

[nastypoisonspikes]

Starforce is kind of the same, I guess, in that you shouldn't support companies that employ that technology. Actually, I'm not sure, but it sounds like Starforce wouldn't be able to embed itself in your system if you're running the 64-bit version of Vista, which only allows signed drivers to run. That of course does cause problems with drivers that are old, open source, etc., but YOU HAVE TO BREAK EGGS TO MAKE OMELETTES.

[dosraider]

In my books starforce copy protection is an invitation to use pirate software where this malware is removed from.

[wardrich]

[AdamN]

I agree with dayaccus, why change if your running Windows XP SP2?
I looked into getting the Operating System but decided not to go with it and just stick with XP SP2. Even the new laptop I have ordered will be getting XP SP2 instead of Vista!