Mail Archives: djgpp/2000/02/17/22:25:55
Kalum Somaratna aka Grendel wrote:
That's of topic but ....
> > > there was this user who was complainig that RHIDE with windoze
> > > gave him a back screen and then the system locked up.
> >
> > This is the example I was talking about above; however, if you run RHIDE
> > windowed then all that happens is it kills the process when it crashes.
>
> sloowwwwwww. Please see how slow vga games like doom are windowed.
The frame rate is good if you have a good accelerator. I got amazed when I saw
what Riva 128 cards can do to emulate 320x200x256 in a window that is part of a
desktop running at 1024x768x65536.
> BTW It
> isn't possible to run VESA based dos games windowed.
Correction: No windows driver bothers to implement it. But is posible.
> Also have you noticed
> that when you are running a vesa game full screen and you accidently press
> that #@$*! M$ startmenu key , you cant re switch to your game as windoze
> says that it can't redraw the display etc.. very nice I suppose ;-)
Again a driver problem.
I really think Windows is broken by design, but you must understand the
difference between the errors in the kernel (a lot) and the problems with
hardware drivers. There are a lot of things that makes Windows unstable, but the
explanation is very off topic.
A Windows machine with solid drivers and running solid applications is stable
enough for the average user. But I saw machines that: reboots when you leave a
djgpp program that correctly hooked/unhooked the mouse interrupt (first shows a
blue screen and then reboots), reboot when a windowed application calls interrupt
0x10 to switch to mode 0x13 (S3 chipsets mostly), BIOS that doesn't implment
VGA services and lets the machine in an unusable state if you call BIOS (mostly
Matrox), etc. And NT is just a little bit more solid because applications are
better protected, but again, a bad driver will make your system just crap.
Somebody in this thread said NT runs in any hardware and Linux don't, well, in my
experience hardware drivers for Linux are usually much more stable, so you don't
have this silly hardware dependence found in Windows.
> Not just time critical but it is not good for running _any_ software that
> you need to depend upon.
And lamentably the industry is overlooking it and NT is currently the standard
for industrial automation, that's very sad. Agilent (formerly Hewlett
Packard) have osciloscopes running Windows, imagine an engineer saying "I can't
measure it because my osciloscope hangs"
> > But for the average home user, who just wants to do some word
> > processing and play a few games, Windows is the best out there.
>
> Not anymore, see how many users are using Linux. Some PC companies
> actually sell PC's with Linux as the only OS preinstalled.
I like Linux, but please be objetive, 12 millon of Linux users (most of them are
dual boot users) is a minority.
Please don't take me wrong (see the headers of this mail and look what OS I'm
using right now, also see what programs I contributed to djgpp). But I don't want
to see these threads where people becomes fanatic and lose the focus.
SET
--
Salvador Eduardo Tropea (SET). (Electronics Engineer)
Visit my home page: http://welcome.to/SetSoft or
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