[rescue] Waaaay OT: Games and workstations

[deanders at pcisys.net]

At 10:42 PM 4/21/2003 -0500, you wrote:
<snip>
>Don't forget the frame buffer.  It wouldn't be hard for the frame buffer
>alone to take up 10 megs of the video card memory.  SGIs use seperate
>frame buffers and TRAMS.  I think that geometry only gets stored in
>general ram, and anything it gets cached in.  I don't think there is
>dedicated geometry ram on SGIs. 

True, but that still shouldn't pose a huge problem on a 32MB or 64MB card.

>> Given that my PS2 cost about $300 (more like $200 now) and my Win2k gaming
>> system (if I didn't play games, I wouldn't need this...but I do, and I'm
>> not willing to put up with the headache that is gaming under
>> Linux/Wine)
>
>I don't put up with the headache of linux/wine either.  Thus, I play
>linux games or console games.  And when I get the money for a reasonable
>mac, I'd be happy to play mac games.  Most quality PC games are
>available on one of the other platforms anyway.

Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say "mainstream" rather than
"quality". :)

That said, I could *almost* manage all of my (non-console) gaming on a Mac
(probably not under Linux, though); there are, however, a few drawbacks.
The cost of the platform is one of them--if I buy a Mac, it'll almost
certainly be an iBook (at least in the near future), and I wouldn't plan on
doing much gaming on it. A proper desktop system with a decent video card
would be quite expensive. 

There's also quite a bit of inertia involved: I've been playing DOS/Windows
games since, oh, about 1988 or so. I've got a rather large library of
games. The earlier ones will usually run decently under emulation (bochs is
your friend), but there are still quite a few that are too recent to
emulate (or, like Privateer, have really weird memory management issues
that prevent them from running under anything but a 'real' DOS system).
Many of these are available for Macs as well, but the idea of replacing my
library of games just so I can avoid Windows seems a bit ridiculous (while
I am not particularly fond of Windows in general, it does do well enough
for gaming, at least in my experience). 

And, of course, there are still those few games (like Operation Flashpoint,
which consumes something like 80% of my game playing time lately) which
just aren't available for anything but Windows. 

>But, the point is, I want to play games when I want to play them.  Not 3
>hours after I first wanted to play it because that's how long it took to
>bloody beat windows into submission.

My gaming system has been pretty docile; it's always on and I almost never
need to reboot it (uptime usually maxes out around one or two weeks thanks
to power outages and occasional weird software installs). If I want to play
a game, I sit down, stick the CD in, and play. It's rare that I need to do
anything special to get a particular game to work.

On the other hand, I do try to keep my system relatively up to date, but
all that really entails is the occasional driver or DirectX update. I
imagine I'd have to do roughly the same amount of work with a Mac or a
Linux system.

Besides, aren't Windows systems just toys? You should be rejoicing in the
fact that I only use them for games and leave the real work to real
operating systems (almost all of my actual 'work' (comp sci assignments,
random programming, etc.) is done under Solaris and Linux), right? :)


Derek Andersen

(c'mon, we're arguing about systems that we play *games* on...not
mission-critical servers)