On Sat, 23 Jul 2005 13:11:08 EDT, Ed Finnell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >I don't understand. Most games are written for the 128bit chipsets >in Playstation, Nintendo and X-Box. They have to be tinkered to >run on XP. I've got a box full of 3.5" diskettes that all run under DOS >compliments of various students. Haven't played most of them >in years. Don't know don't care.
When you say "chipsets", I am assuming you mean the graphics processing unit (GPU) chips? I don't understand what you mean by "tinkered"? There are PC (WinXP) versions of many of the games that run on game machines, but making them run on multiple platforms requires a bit more than "tinkering". There are also many games that only run on PCs, sometimes because they require more resources than the game machines provide. In any case, these games are typically not written for a specific GPU, even if they are written to run on game consoles. They are written to use APIs for graphic/sound, since code portability is important. In the case of the XBOX, this API is almost identical to the WinXP API, so there is an even higher level of portability. If this code was written directly to the hardware, as you seem to think, then it would not work on the vast majority of PCs in the world today, since there are numerous different GPU and sound hardware variations with vastly different hardware specs and interfaces. If a game developer were to try to support even 75% of the installed hardware base, they would have to write literally hundreds of versions of their game. In addition to providing a common set of APIs (which are then executed by I/O drivers provided by the hardware provider), WinXP provides many other services that would not be available in DOS (ie virtual storage, multitasking, interrupt handling). I seriously doubt today's complex 3D games could be made to run any better under DOS (if at all), even if one were willing to re-invent the wheel so many times. What I don't understand is how, on a mailing list where we are all ostensibly OS experts, some can be so oblivious to the basic facts about a platform we all use on a regular basis. There seems to be a level of ignorance among many (but not all) mainframers with regard to PCs that only serves to reinforce the stereotypes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
