Re: Hardpressed and Salvation

[rubywand@aol.com (RUBYWAND)]

In article <4la5m8$gaj@gap.cco.caltech.edu>, nathan@cco.caltech.edu
(Nathan Mates) writes:

>....
>   Err, what the heck are you talking about? Win95 and other things
>that eat HDs for lunch have been a great selling point for
>compression. And would you care to specify exactly _which_ games
>written in the last 2 years have gone to custom OS's that access the
>HD and break compression? When MS-DOG 6.0 came out, sure, some things
>may have been broken, but if your software won't work on the 2-40% of
>people that use compression, you've locked yourself out of the market.
>
>   Disk-based copy protection is passe. Booklets, etc are in.


    Ultima VIII was one of the first popular games to not support
operation on a compressed hard disk. Since then, many (probably most)
high-performance games employ a custom OS which is not compatble with
software-based compression schemes like the one supplied by Microsoft.

     A PC user who employs some kind of software-based HD "doubler" does
not, automatically, give up the chance to run new games, etc. which are
incompatible. Quite a few of these games use relatively litttle HD space
and can run from an uncompressed part of the hard disk.

    The purpose of the special OS is improved performance. It does not
prevent copying. As you say, documentation can be a very good form of
protection. Any large game on CD's has pretty good 'built-in' protection. 


    The biggest killer of sw HD compression on PC is the plummeting cost
of large HD's. Many users dumped compression about the time that 540MB
drives became too small to justify the space taken up in a tower!

    So long as GS users are stuck with SCSI, the cost of upgrading to
large HD may make sw HD compression attractive to some. Too bad.
Software-based HD compression is one more large sub-system and, yet
another layer of complexity.  

>....
>   2GB disks? That's either a ton of ProDOS partitions, or a few large
>ones for the hopefully bugfree HFS one. Not like you're gonna really
>_want_ to store 2GB of stuff on a GS.

    Hard disk space is like the beakers and flasks in a lab-- you always
end up using ("needing!") what you've got. Admittedly, 2GB on a IIgs _is_
a pretty stiff test for this rule. An updated ProDOS would be a major
boost to productivity; so would more RAM (like 32MB), more speed, better
video, and an E-IDE interface. 

    Soon, we shall need to decide whether more IIgs plug-ins makes sense.
For the cost of  8MB RAM card + 2nd Sight + Zip-GS/TWGS soup-ups + bigger
SCSI HD + faster SCSI CD-ROM, we could come up with a GS-X motherboard
aimed at the 21st century.  



Rubywand