Are games played in win 2000 better or just playable?

[Kookstick]

I have checked to see if all my hardware is compatible and it seems to be, I will have to use some beta drivers but oh well. I think I want to install W2k only and skip the dual boot thing, Would I want to then use the NTFS instead of fat 32 right?Because I heard its faster but will it still play games using NTFS? Don't get me wrong, I don't only play games.I also burn cd's, use office 2000,quickbooks pro,quicken 2000,and my business is on this system but I want to play rogue in my free time. THX

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Asus P2b(1010),P3 500,256 mb pc133,Matrox G400 DH,Asus 50x,Iomega zip,Mitsumi CDR,Ibm 10 gb hd,Sb Live,Win 98

[Zypher]

All Win32 programs work transparently on NTFS, though there are certainly a few that REQUIRE it . The only games/programs you are going to have no hope with in the long run are dos programs, or windows programs that are hackjobs. Win32 apps should be ok besides a few bugs to be ironed out. The small time/fluff programs seem to have the most trouble, except for the REALLY small programs which work quite well. (the ones where they put their quality free time into the dlls, for ex: motherboard monitor, fireburner, wcpuid, dnet and dcypher clients and so on)

If Win2k is going to be the only thing you are running on a particular system, by all means choose NTFS. If not, give it at least its own little 2gb partition and make that ntfs, leave windows/file partitions as Fat32. The reason I said 'fat32 support sucks' is if you use it for your swapfile and/or os partition in win2k, its quite noticiably slower.

You can even use that dynamic disks thing too, its actually quite useful inside of Win2k, resize partitions on the fly, set up software raid, change drive letters on the fly etc. Its hostile to any non-w2k os though. Avoid if you dualboot anything else at all. You CAN multiboot different versions of w2k (I did pro and adv server for a time) as long as they get different system folders or partitions (the latter is better). I have no idea whether NT4 can read dynamic disks, but it can read w2ks ntfs...might want to patch up to sp6 if you keep them on the same parition since they fiddled with some things and w2k has a 'newer' version of ntfs. Honestly, unless its a lower end system theres not many good reasons to stick with NT4 over W2k. Cost and its a pain in ass being the only good ones I can come up with, the former is circumvented by those willing enough and the latter is no big deal most of the time.

My $0.03

Athlon 800 amd751/756 256mb
g400 Max
Win98/W2k AS

BTW the 5.04 drivers which are supposedly only for standard Milleniums work Fine on the Max. I personally think thats a misprint by a matrox person, I suspect they meant to type the MARVEL would have its own driver

Either that or the few extra megahertz of the Max needs to have its own WHQL tests...nah, I bet they just tested the Max to being with, a 'worst case scenario' kind of thing.

Stupid edit message.

[This message has been edited by Zypher (edited 08 April 2000).]

[Chucky Cheese]

Kookstick,

on my system scsi id 0(boot) is ntfs where i install win2k and all my applications except games and archiving folders... for mp3s', hdd images, downloaded programs and such. i have 4 physical hdds' and scsi ids' 1,2&3 are fat32, i'm not seeing any problems launching games or "setup" applications writing to the ntfs partition in this configuration.

chucky

[ObiBen]

Kookstick,

Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear will run just fine in Win2K, and so does the expansion, Urban Operations. The only problem that I heard of for playing RS under Win2K happened to a friend of mine.

We love playing RS, and add mods to the game (like any game), makes it even more fun. One of the more popular mods, Lloyd's Weapons Mod, doesn't install under Win2K all that great. The FAQ on the LWM site wasn't all too helpful. What we ended up doing was copying my entire RS install directory from my HD over top of his installation. This process captured all the files necesary to run the mod.

The Lloyd's Weaspon Mod uses DOS batch files to install stuff, and Win2K doesn't let you run DOS batch files (someone want to confirm that for me, please). Anyway, other than that, Win2K is a pretty good OS, but I personally decided not to stick with it and I went back to NT4.



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Regards,

Ben

Config: AOPen AX6BC Pro II Millenium Edition, P3 500E@715, 256MB PC133 RAM, SB Live!, 3Com 3C509TX 10/100, Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI adapter, Quantum Atlas III 9.1GB U2W, IBM 13.5 GXP IDE HD, Yamaha 4416S writer, Pioneer 36X SCSI CD reader, STB Blackmagic V2 (SLI) - removed after new TurboGL, Matrox G400MAX (Yeah!), Viewsonic PS790 and G773, Win98SE and WinNT 4 Server

[Gurm]

Yes, there is a certain type of game that is always going to fail on you. It's anything from a certain dark period where some developers were still using DOS Extenders under Win95, and some were using a combination of 16 and 32-bit Windows code.

Examples of such games:

1. Dungeon Keeper 1 - this game had problems with WinAlign, because the 16-bit code in the loader made assumptions about what physical order the executable would be in on the disk. Ugly. It crashed under anything higher than Win95 (Memphis betas, Win98, etc.) until they finally patched it.

1a. There are several other games which work like DK1, I just haven't had personal experience with them.

2. Duke Nukem type games, using a non Win2k friendly DOS Extender. Doom's DOS Extender seems to be fine, since id apparently used very kosher calls to do their memory management. However, many other DOS Extenders (Phar-Lap, DOS 4/gw, Triton, etc.) just flatly refuse to run under Win2k.

3. Any game that makes assumptions about certain types of system calls being available that aren't part of the DirectX or Win32 APIs are going to have trouble.

3a. The good news is that Whistler and/or some of the service packs for Win2k are going to add a "personality emulator", which will translate specific sets of calls into native code. For example, the Win95A emulator will accept all Win95A native calls, even those that were removed in subsequent builds! This will be a GREAT day for seamless backwards compatibility (for those of us who LOVE our old games), but it's not even in the beta stages yet so we may not see it until 2001.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Galvin]

A win95/98 emulator can be bad for win2K or whistler. It will just keep making devolopers wanting to stay with the old and not code native win2K/whistler applications.

Also I heard in windows ME that it won't support VxD's or is microsoft saying don't make apps that use VxD's for this OS ?

[Gurm]

No no Galvin, you're missing the point. The point isn't current games - most of those run under Win2k or need a patch. They're not going to make a "win98SE emulator". They're going to make a virtual machine of sorts that traps bad Win95 and Win31 calls and reroutes them. It's going to be very limited in scope, though - almost exclusively for games.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.