25th January 2011, 1:44 AM
(This post was last modified: 25th January 2011, 2:03 AM by Dark Jaguar.)
I consider my old games part of my "library" of games, and I tend to want to be able to enjoy them for years to come. I don't throw away decades old books after all. Same thing here. I don't consider old art to be "obsolete", that's all. I mean I get that some people don't care that much. Those are the people content to just throw out all their old VHS tapes when their VCR dies rather than go through transferring them to DVDs or Bluray.
The alternatives, which would work but are more awkward to set up, involve either duel booting with multiple partitions or just buying really old parts off of eBay and building a "retro computer" for all this. Besides I'm nothing. There are people who go through great lengths to keep the old MT-32 music synthesizer from the 80's working on present computers because it provides the best quality sound for a number of old DOS games and is very tricky to properly emulate.
The distressing thing, to me, is all the whisperings of ARM processors killing x86 processors. Windows 8 will have a version designed for ARM, and all the speculators out there are talking about how ARMs are the next big wave, having already dominated portable systems.
There may be truth to that, but it'll certainly be difficult to convince me to switch. In fact, it'll be hard to convince most current Windows users who have even a decent number of modern programs they want to keep using to switch. In the end though, I do see it standing a good chance at dominating the laptop market.
I do wish they'd do a least a little more token support of legacy applications though. Directsound support in Vista/7 is just gone. That's more than just a legacy issue. That's bad moving forwards. MS has seen fit to do ALL sound processing via software. Well, that's not good. I bought an x-fi sound card for a reason after all. Sure just about anything that card can do can be done in software, but that's true of direct3d as well, but no one in their right mind would WANT to do that.
Sound acceleration takes the burden off the CPU, allowing it to handle other tasks instead. Creative and others have been forced to kludge together a solution. Games built with Vista and 7 in mind just directly look for X-Fi sound cards to give them commands directly. Yay, what is this the pre-directx days? What happens when a viable competitor to Creative finally shows up? As for older XP games, Creative had to put out a special program called "Alchemy" that sits resident in the background and intercepts calls to Direct Sound. However each game has to be added manually via a menu, and not all of them work (as mentioned before, Planescape Torment doesn't work with Alchemy). Bioshock does, and I can say that EAX turned on does improve the frame rates, as one would expect, as well as give me snappier sounds.
MS removing support for that was not a good long term plan. GPUs are being merged with CPUs in the future, and honestly I could foresee putting sound acceleration into the CPU as well to directly tie it all together for even quicker sound response in games, but only if the operating system supports those sorts of calls.
The removal of 16 bit support really is a purely legacy issue, but one that has some unexpected consequences, like, as I said, 16 bit installers for otherwise 32 bit programs. This one I blame Intel for. I am not sure why a true 16 bit support couldn't have been rigged into 64 bit mode just like it was into 32 bit mode. What confuses me even more is that 16 bit apps CAN run in 64 bit mode under a virtualized environment. Weird...
The alternatives, which would work but are more awkward to set up, involve either duel booting with multiple partitions or just buying really old parts off of eBay and building a "retro computer" for all this. Besides I'm nothing. There are people who go through great lengths to keep the old MT-32 music synthesizer from the 80's working on present computers because it provides the best quality sound for a number of old DOS games and is very tricky to properly emulate.
The distressing thing, to me, is all the whisperings of ARM processors killing x86 processors. Windows 8 will have a version designed for ARM, and all the speculators out there are talking about how ARMs are the next big wave, having already dominated portable systems.
There may be truth to that, but it'll certainly be difficult to convince me to switch. In fact, it'll be hard to convince most current Windows users who have even a decent number of modern programs they want to keep using to switch. In the end though, I do see it standing a good chance at dominating the laptop market.
I do wish they'd do a least a little more token support of legacy applications though. Directsound support in Vista/7 is just gone. That's more than just a legacy issue. That's bad moving forwards. MS has seen fit to do ALL sound processing via software. Well, that's not good. I bought an x-fi sound card for a reason after all. Sure just about anything that card can do can be done in software, but that's true of direct3d as well, but no one in their right mind would WANT to do that.
Sound acceleration takes the burden off the CPU, allowing it to handle other tasks instead. Creative and others have been forced to kludge together a solution. Games built with Vista and 7 in mind just directly look for X-Fi sound cards to give them commands directly. Yay, what is this the pre-directx days? What happens when a viable competitor to Creative finally shows up? As for older XP games, Creative had to put out a special program called "Alchemy" that sits resident in the background and intercepts calls to Direct Sound. However each game has to be added manually via a menu, and not all of them work (as mentioned before, Planescape Torment doesn't work with Alchemy). Bioshock does, and I can say that EAX turned on does improve the frame rates, as one would expect, as well as give me snappier sounds.
MS removing support for that was not a good long term plan. GPUs are being merged with CPUs in the future, and honestly I could foresee putting sound acceleration into the CPU as well to directly tie it all together for even quicker sound response in games, but only if the operating system supports those sorts of calls.
The removal of 16 bit support really is a purely legacy issue, but one that has some unexpected consequences, like, as I said, 16 bit installers for otherwise 32 bit programs. This one I blame Intel for. I am not sure why a true 16 bit support couldn't have been rigged into 64 bit mode just like it was into 32 bit mode. What confuses me even more is that 16 bit apps CAN run in 64 bit mode under a virtualized environment. Weird...
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)