Re: The Eventual Famine
Hi Tom.
If microsoft were a small company or hobby developer I would agree with you. For example, it would be unreasonable to expect david greenwood to take the time and trouble to make the newer time of conflict 2.0 compatible with older time of conflict version 1 save files. however, microsoft is a massive company with millions of customers and millions to spare for development. They could! put millions of dollars into supporting their older components and building that support into future windows because frankly they have that kind of money, indeed they did this with xp after the initial release broke compatibility with windows 9x and dos. I don't dispute the fact that better languages than vb6 or better components than vb net could be created, however with the shear amount of software developed, developed with the components and tools that microsoft themselves recommended as you yourself said, they really should be responsable, particularly considdering that not all the developers creating software in the early 2000's, software which still runs and is still being used are around anymore or able to do a complex rewrite of all their programs just because microsoft can't be bothered to support them anymore.
a good example of this is the graphical Turrican windows remake T2002. It was developed in as you would imagine 2002, modified in 2006, however it was the student project of several German developers.
Not only does it recreate many original Turrican style levels (with the original graphics, mechanics and gameplay thanks to a good word from the game's creator), but it also comes with a level editer. People have been using this editer to create level packs, some of which are virtually separate games in their own right. There are now close to 70 of these and new ones are still being written.
However on windows 8 T2002 does not run properly. I suspect this is a direct X issue but have no idea, however it ha s severely irritated a lot of people that a tool developed in 2002 which has sinse been used to create a massive corpus of in many cases quite exceptional work has just been effectively killed by microsoft.
It's odd actually, sinse this is something console developers learnt pretty quickly. I still own a snes and a mega drive, however if I ever did! decide to buy a Wii, I would not be the least worried about losing out on my games sinse nearly the entire cannon is available for the Wii via virtual console. There is a very small charge, (about 5 usd for nes games and 10 for snes games), which I suspect exists to cover the hosting, but certainly this is a case where even when the hardware is 20 years old Nintendo, sega etc have listened to the customers, and thus original Marrio brothers, mega man etc can all be played on modern machines.
Microsoft really should take lessons .
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=172502#p172502
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