Re: Goodbye Windows XP, i still get nistalgic over you.
Indeed, XP seems to have been the gaming OS for a lot of us. Now, why is that? Sure, it emerged at about the right time for the exploding audio games market, even though the initial versions were crazily revolutionary, much as Vista was. I remember Matt and I (then at uni, and of course soon to work on AQ which was particularly suited to XP and Linux) called it "Windows, Extremely Patronising". No doubt because of the absurdly consumer focus (themes, dialog boxes rendered in HTML with hideous levels of command buttons to reach the settings one wanted, etc) on an operating system that had just undergone the NT transition, unlike Win2k. In fact, I jumped in early when XP was first supported by Window-Eyes, which itself now had just undergone the NT transition, and as a result downgraded back to 2K rather than 98 until XP matured a little and Microsoft finally killed off 2K, which by that time had significant disadvantages in hardware, DOS compatibility, boot-time speed, etc. Indeed, it wasn't that long ago that we both observed how XP was "The OS that refused to die". But still, XP was particularly fun-filled. Perhaps not to the degree that the 9x family was, but still, it was easy to manipulate and configure and easy to purpose according to one's own wishes, much as the hobbyist DOS-based OSs before it were. I believe that contributed significantly to its success. Nobody wants their computer to be the boss of them, and that's especially important for gaming. Sadly Microsoft seems to have forgotten that computers should, on the whole, be pleasant to use and shouldn't enrage their users. About the only thing I couldn't handle was development on the platform, held hostage by Microsoft's licensing--which Microsoft apologists always claim is Microsoft's endeavour to keep itself from outpricing the competition. Ha! What a laugh!
Memories, memories, memories …
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=171630#p171630
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