rec.autos.simulators

I sell, configure, support nt environments, many of which use 95 workstations.  
I sell and use microsoft products all the time, from office to exchange and
sequel, and have a healthly respect for the programmers who take on such
mammoth tasks.

Of course I use dos for any game that will allow me too, and hate the games
which demand windows 95.  from my experience i get lower frame rates and
annoying pauses which have to be hunted down (95 doing things in the
background) ie turn off network, cd autoplay, whatever.  It's annoying (dry
humour) to come into the last bend on a perfect lap and have a pause  put you
into the wall, especially if you're well into a race.  

I'd like to see it too. I'm sure they'd be many tips i'm not aware of.

This has always been the argument against DOS. And it's well grounded in fact.  
However, the problem was the same for every game, and the supplement was
pretty much the same for every game. I think the average win95 user will
suffer heavily from regular pauses and won't have the faintest idea why they
get them.  There is very little documentation in games (or any other standard
literature) to help with solving them.

Brian

A  martyr...  youre so dramatic. =)  Do you get yourself so wound up
everytime someone disagrees with you ??  Must make life pretty
difficult.

I would rather put a bootdisk in the drive and turn a computer on...
(it really is pretty simple.. you just flick the switch!) and boot the
computer through that than worry about turning off everything that is
running in the background of windows95 and the dreaded hard drive
swapping that takes place.

IMHO.. I was just stating that I thought it was much simpler to get a
game to run in dos than windows95.  I dont have any preference what so
ever to where the damn games are run.. as long as they DO run.  DOS,
Windows95, NT, 98....  dont care.  I just want to play the game in the
best possible way to get the most enjoyment out of it.

Scott B. Husted
http://www.racesimcentral.net/~sbhusted

--
Allen Johnson PP-ASEL ......... Remove the NOSPAM. to respond
Spook's Law on Software:  If you haven't found a bug then you
haven't accessed the right piece of code yet.
Corollary: Working code is simply so many malfunctioning bugs.

Thank you Allen  =)

I agree with you obviously.

Scott B. Husted
http://www.racesimcentral.net/~sbhusted

A myth. Nascar (MS-DOS) was very slow even on top machines when it
came out. F1GP2 (MS-DOS) was very slow even on top machines when it
came out (the sole reason I didn't buy F1GP2 back then for my
P90/P133).

Ubisoft F1RS (Win95) on the other hand, damn doesn't it run smooth on
my mediocre 233MMX/3Dfx! ;-) And it looks great too, a far cry from
F1GP2.

I wasn't happy with the speed when I played Falcon 3 on my 486-33/8MB
back then, TsengLabs video card (fast). Ran at maybe 10-15 fps mostly
I think, and the graphics are a laugh by today's standards. Lores and
all (puke). Only now, with 3Dfx cards, are the flight simulators
starting to look and run as they should, for example EF2000 2.0,
Jetfighter 3 and F/A-18 Hornet: Korea.

And oh boy, does anyone remember Strike Commander (MS-DOS)? Now wasn't
that TERRIBLY SLOW on any machine back then? I remember the first time
I actually enjoyed that flight "sim" was a year or two after that, when
I bought a new 90Mhz Pentium.

How soon we forget...

Well the recommendations were wrong. It was S-L-O-W even on 486-33/8MB
machines with fast TsengLabs graphics card, especially when you had
several wingmen.

And it was a *** to set up as well. It needed 600kB of conventional
memory MINIMUM, and more for advanced features. I use whole days just
trying to figure out how to get well over 600kB for that one game back
then.

Exactly.

More memory yes, all your other guesses are rubbish.

I know it is fashionable to hate "winblozzzz" and "bili gates", but
next time try to find some more convincing scapegoats, ok?
You just seem so extremely ignorant when you claim all the problems in
the world are due to "winblozzzzz". No, games would not be considerably
faster if they were coded for DOS instead of Win95, that is nothing but
a myth spread by ignorant people trying to find easy scapegoats.
But I must admit you are so witty inventing such word as "winblozzzzz",
he he... It kind of makes a very good point for you, and shows you look at
this all so objectively.

(Oh my)

As much as I would love to take credit for it...  Winblowz95 is used
generously all over the net.  So I cant take credit for that =)

My 486 33 with 16megs of ram ran Falcon 3.0 with no problems.  Took me
less than an hour to get the game to run smoothly.

I agree... the graphics are "laughable" compared to anything in the last
couple of years.  

As you said, recommended settings are usually false.  YES.. you can PLAY
the game with the minimum requirements...  but usually sucks because you
have to turn so much off and many time forced to accept shitty
framerate.

I cant comment on F1 on windows95 (never played it).  Also.. as your
point of objectivity.  If you had read my post earlier I had said I
really dont give a damn about the operating system (be it DOS, 95, 98,
NT, ps/2, etc)  All I really CARE about is being able to play the game
the way it is suppose to be played (all eye candy, etc).  Also... I
believe if you had read an earlier post I had said I dont HATE
Microsoft, I own so many of their software packages and could not live
without Office 97 for my financial and business needs.  

Scott

Flight simulators, now there's another good reason not to like Win95 -
the terible controller-input code in DirectX that causes "joystick
jitters" on a very large number of systems (though not on all of
them). Diagnostic programs with speed adjustable gamecards have proved
these problems are NOT hardware-related, but are in fact caused by
buggy Win95 low-level device-input code.

Joe

Sorry for the indirect reference; news server replacement...

(nothing that I'm responding to)

---Jim

No, I'm just telling you how you come off.  I'm not wound up at all.
Just trying to shine a little light on the subject.

Valid complaint, but lets go back to your bootdisk thing.  So you have
a bunch of boot disks and then you upgrade a piece of hardware.
Oops...gotta go through and re-work every one of your boot disks to
load the new hardware drivers and make sure they are aligned correctly
so they fit in high memory or you won't have enough conventional left
to run your game.  I remember one of my biggest DOS hassles was a DOS
game that required the CD to be in the drive, but there was no way for
me to get my CD drivers loaded in such a way that the game felt there
was enough memory to run the game.  Ahh the memories come flooding
back (that one was a next-day return btw).

Randy

I thought that the minimum for N1 was a P90 but I must be thinking of
somehting else because I just looked at the box and it reckons you can
run it on a 386 DX 33 with 6MB Ram (you can run it with 4mb RAM but with
reduced graphic detail!).

Quentin
--
                                     -/\_
            +                       -/\  \___    --==>
Quentin Christensen            ####//_\\___\_              +

You must make your enemy your bud   -\/ _/          +     --==>
and all will be well...              -\/
http://www.ozramp.net.au/~minx/index.html

Bob

<HTML>
Most definately.&nbsp; Im not sure its true... but isnt 98 (memphis) going
to be the last 95 upgrade ??&nbsp; Then THE OS will be NT ??

<P>Scott B. Husted
<BR><A HREF="http://home.ptd.net/~sbhusted">http://home.ptd.net/~sbhusted</A>
<BR>&nbsp;

<BR>>>>>>>>>>>>SNIP&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;
<BR>>>
<BR>>Actually I don't remember all those DOS configurations being that
<BR>>much of a problem, at least not more than once.&nbsp; I certainly
don't
<BR>>think they were significantly more difficult than the configuring
<BR>>and driver upgrades Windows seems to constantly require.&nbsp; I guess
<BR>>it's just what I grew up with.
<BR>>&nbsp; FWIW, I realize that DOS is going to die due to market pressure
<BR>>no matter how much I like it, but as long as manufacturers continue
<BR>>to make games with the option to play in DOS I'll keep on buying
<BR>>the DOS version............................

<P>Well i hope people don't get too sentimental for Win_9? either because
it's
<BR>soon gonna die the same ugly death DOS is going through. Bill has seen
your
<BR>future and it is NT.

<P>Bob</BLOCKQUOTE>
&nbsp;</HTML>

These "speed adjustable gamecards" are a joke, a thing of the past.
Sticks like Wingman Extreme Digital and Sidewinder 3DPro are the new
generation of how flight sticks should use that single gameport on
your sound card, too bad some of the dinosaurs (CH, Thrustmaster) are
still making those old MS-DOS sticks with their big latency, inaccurate
controls, silly restrictions for how many buttons you can press at the
same time etc.

Yes they are. The way these old MS-DOS sticks use the game port is a
bad joke, ask any games programmer who has programmed DOS games with
joystick support. Fortunately we are getting rid of that poor legacy
hardware with DirectInput.