Originally posted by Unregistered Thanks also for your amazing show of overly witty sarcasm.
Was going for "gritty", but "C'est la Vie".
It was nice of you to give me a list of Glidos components, but an uninstall feature would have been great, too.
If you look at the list, you'll see that just deleting the GliDOS directory does everything needed. The desktop and Start menu shortcuts would just be dead end links, no effect on your system. Of course, considering how GliDOS works, just leaving it in it's directory and not using isn't going to be harming anything either. (I believe the reverse may be true however, if there is a different Glide DLL in your Windows directory and it's accessed before using GliDOS, it would probably create a DLL conflict for titles using GliDOS.)
As a long time windows user, it's quite disconcerting when a program has no uninstall entry under add/remove,
I highly recommend a tool like Cleansweep to monitor Windows program installations. While the Add/Remove option is always good to have, it is quite frequently "not entirely truthful". You are completely depending on the program's author to undo exactly what they changed when their program was installed and quite often you will get a "minimal" uninstall, leaving behind DLL's, directories, and (pet peeve of mine) registry entries.
Sometimes this is just because the author is "playing it safe" (the DLL it leaves might be used by something else), but frequently it's a shareware program leaving a record of it's installation or just plain sloppiness. Paul's install is pretty tidy. Many Windows installers aren't.
... and then renaming the install directory fails to affect the operation of the program. Scary.
That's because Paul's program is not like many "bloatware" programs that tie themselves into your registry and your operating system's associations, it's small and contained within the GliDOS directory. The only thing that might "break" would be the desktop or start menu shortcuts (you would need to re-create the shortcuts or point the old ones to the new directory). Not scary. Honest.
Since I found Glidos from the tombraiderchronicles.com website, it was pretty damned obvious what the authors intentions were. Which means mine are different. Wahoo.
My point is that GliDOS supports multiple titles. Carmageddon fans want concentration on their favorite title, Redguard fans want theirs to take precedence, Grand Theft Auto fans want theirs at the top-of-the-list for improvements, etc... Paul is doing this by himself, so any time spent on one title means he won't have time to work on another.
He has already had a couple of tangent projects that ate up a serious chunk of programming time: the Glide version of Blood and "Red Baron 3D". The Blood tangent kind of died on it's own because after all the time spent on it, it was still arguable if the 3dfx version was actually better than the software version and "Red Baron 3D" fans swarmed all over him like vampire bats when they found that his modified Glide DLL allowed RB3D to run without a Voodoo card.
Fortunately, GoldFinger has taken up work on the actual wrapper (with good support from members like CraigG, Dominus, DosFreak, Kaminari, and LSD), allowing Paul a little more "breathing room".
Glidos is far from flawless.
We're not saying that, especially not Paul. To get "flawless" emulation, you have to emulate an entire PC, complete with adjustable processor speed and full emulation of the Voodoo chipset amongst other things. Due to the different ways DOS Glide titles worked, full emulation of a particular title might not be possible. To get these titles working in a Windows environment without an actual Voodoo 1 video card, Paul has to jump through numerous hoops and sometimes...break a few rules in the process.
Having said all that, there is a memory issue with GliDOS+Carmageddon, so you might want to read this post:
showthread.php?threadid=1023
The problem with 'user friendly' comes when you have to edit the .ini file to change the directory Glidos looks in to access the game. For some unknown reason, by default, it looks under /intrply/carma or some such rot. Interplay didn't have jack to do with Carmageddon,
As Snover has already explained, Interplay handled Carmageddon's distribution in the USA, so that undoubtedly is the default directory installation for the Interplay release.
(Funny thing is, Paul's in the U.K., but he ended up with the American version)
That option should be editable in the front-end, where the other options are.
That would need extra code and bloat the program accordingly, and would only be needed for non-default installations. Also remember that it's exclusively for DOS titles: DOS games on modern PC's (especially within Windows) are going to need tweaking for them to work properly on "modern" PC's. That’s going to involve messing with .CFG, .INI and .BAT files and the like. Most gamers with a love for DOS titles are already familiar with doing that so there hasn’t been much call for that kind of feature. Of course Pauls the programmer so he probably has a thing or two to say about that...
4. Since I live in Australia, my contribution of US equates to almost double that after the exchange rate....
We can't really answer that as Paul is the sole programmer and he's in the U.K. and we're (mostly) in the U.S.A. There might be an easier way of going from Australian dollars to British pounds, but the maze-like process of international monetary exchange makes me doubt it.
5. Does Glidos support Carmageddon expansions, such as Splat Pack or community modifications?
"NoGood" (a member of the board) is only one to have mentioned it, but didn't say whether or not it worked.
P.S.
No angry emails from outraged "RedBaron 3D" fans please.
No angry emails from outraged vampire bats either, please.
