Re: Hardpressed and Salvation

[nathan@cco.caltech.edu (Nathan Mates)]

In article <4lbaqo$ac@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
RUBYWAND <rubywand@aol.com> wrote:
>In article <4la5m8$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.

   Popular? It bombed bigtime. Nobody liked it as a sequel in the
Ultima series, and it was very darn hard to control, glacial (2+
minutes to get to the title screen on my Pentium 90, 32MB Ram), and
everything else.  Origin's had a history of incompatible gunk for some
of their games (dare I mention 'voodoo memory manager' for Ultima 7),
but they are more of the exception than the rule.

   Origin's suffering from the "we're the industry leader, so if we
do crap everyone will follow; never mind the users who can't run our
stuff" disease that IBM had when it developed the PS/2, MCA, and the
like. What other companies practice shafting their users like this?

   As more things are displaying Windoze 95 compatability labels,
things are _required_ to run, disk compression or not. 


>    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!

   I'll accept this. I got a 1.6GB EIDE disk last october for maybe
$399; prices have dropped about $100 since then. Problem is, EIDE may
be dirt cheap, but SCSI-2 with a nice controller (the 2940) can be far
nicer.  EIDE is what I'll let my Windoze machines have, but my
Linux/Unix boxes will be SCSI.

>    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.  

   One of the problems with GS users upgrading HDs nowadays is that
it's _HARD_ to find new disks under 540MB or such, except for the Zip
drive. (I've got a Maxtor 235MB drive on mine, with a lot (90+) of
GS/OS games compressed with HardPressed) The Quantum 540MB Fireball is
supposed to be incompatible with the RamFAST (the best thing to hit
the GS SCSI scene, bar none), which is what I've got. I just might
pick up a Zip drive for my GS sooner or later for backups and the
like.

   But, as users dump 200-500MB SCSI drives for multi-gig ones,
picking up some used ones cheap will be much easier.


>>   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. 

    32MB Ram on a GS? Again, what the heck would you be doing with
that?  This is not the PC world where Windoze 95 sucks down 28MB of
ram on boot.  Sure, if you totally redesigned the bus (or just went
PCI-- it'd be nice to put a 33Mhz 65816 running at full speed) and
everything, this would rock. Problem is, you need someone with 1) A
clue as to doing so 2) money.  (The two are either not together in the
first place, or they're off making more money in the computer industry
already)


>    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.  

   Motherboard design is tricky and expensive. And producing them in
small quantities is also expensive. However, should you be willing to
sell me one for <$600, I'd be very willing to buy it in a few months
(gotta graduate, find a job and start making oodles of $). The biggest
thing to do is dump the 1Mhz bus-- nobody cares about 5.25" drives
anymore, and most common cards (SCSI/IDE, Graphics, sound) could be
thrown on ISA/PCI anyhow.

Nathan Mates



-- 
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~nathan/      <*>
# And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the
# Kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in 
# parables" Mark 4:11, NRSV