Nah, Windows Update just updates their software. It's not a package solution with new software/old software. I was thinking more along the lines of a softwarepackage distribution system.....like the one MS announced today for distribution of PC games online. (Hooray for DRM! Crazy subscription prices! Obsolesence of Games! Huge download times! Server outages!)

I don't think we have anything to worry about as far as an OS-less computer. MS loves their OS....that's a major part of how they make their money....but with everything going online eventually wether we like it or not that will be the future.

As far as efficiency goes......that would all be up to server/servers. Nothing the user has to worry about. All processing would take place on the server. The only thing the home user would have to worry about is local cache/broadband connection.

Heck this is done today Via Remote Desktop/Citrix but it's only for 2D applications and it's not the OS-less solution.

Before someone remarks about how not having an OS is a dumb idea for home PC's.....it's been done for years on LAN's and it's probably already bult into your PC. You simply connect your NIC to the network, grab a DHCP address from the server and boot the OS from the server.

MS doesn't care about NTVDM or DOS. They are killing NTVDM and to them DOS is dead. They are evolving their CLI but that's not NTVDM. I daresay that the next consumer OS after Vista will not have NTVDM. If we're lucky it'll have some VPC equivalent built in but somehow I'd be suprised if they did so.

Actually, I use a static IP on my PC, my modem is all that can use DHCP. However, I don't really see how you can draw the line between a dumb terminal that basically does nothing and an auto negotiation for IP, DNS, and gateway information. It's not really a matter of the remote system doing the processing for your system so much as the remote system keeping the database (albiet a rather small one usually) of information on which IPs are currently marked as available, perhaps which MAC address will have a particular IP reserved, etc.

The fact is, there's a reason that those things are not already more popular. Did you know that if you use the display hook mirror driver, you get pretty surprising speed out of those remote desktop things? The driver still isn't so super fast you're going to be playing any 3D games on there, but, nothing's stopping you from remoting up to a server on your lan and playing minesweeper through that. Why don't you? And don't answer because you're bored with minesweeper, even if you enjoyed it, would you really go to the lengths of using the remote server if your system right there can do it? Do you really want to rely on something that will have service outages and such, possibly right in the middle of a game or maybe even an absolutely vital application? I for one would pay, oh, say roughly the amount I spend on hardware, perhaps, oh, I don't know, say the stuff in my signature rather than a subscription fee to avoid this problem.

The fact is, your system can process the DHCP information more quickly than many routers probably if it's keeping the information in it's own memory much like the router does. But, DHCP is an innately server thing in that you need a central system tracking the information lest you increase the amount of work actually needed to track it. However, something such as minesweeper, a single player game really is just stupid to waste the server's cycles on when you have a perfectly good copy already. What's more, maybe this is some future and you have a 3d accelerated mine sweeper using all sorts of pretty graphics and, heck, a 3d playing field while we're at it (and I'd like to see Java do that worth a crap, because I haven't seen it do anything decent yet.) Step up to the REAL games where having it on your own system means you can do things such as upgrade your video card to get better quality, or play offline on your laptop when the power is off and the internet connections in the area are down. Now imagine switching to the dumb terminal -- oops, the power just went out, and battery backup is useless because you can't get to the server. Well, you wait five hours, give up, go to sleep, get up the next day and try again to find it's finally all back up, yay. Now you get on and find that the servers are bogged down with players and can't handle playing your simple minesweeper game at a decent framerate today (but, don't worry, they promise faster speeds in the future as they upgrade their servers.) If only those two people playing Doom 6 would just stop hogging half the cpu cycles for five minutes... Luckily nice safe Half-Life 5 elected to majorly degrade all the AIs and all visual/audio qualities so that they don't stress the servers as much, so you can maybe play that later when those jerks playing Doom 3 get offline already.

Kind of see where I'm going with this? Dumb terminals have their advantages, specifically in the business world, and that's where they have potential to work and are even actually used occasionally today. In the home user world, they very much do not belong, and this is why they have never caught on.

Anyway, all I can say is you've given me new respect for the fact that I DON'T have to pay a constant subscription fee to write reports in Word or to play Far Cry or just whatever the heck I feel like doing, be it stare at the screen. And, I promise you one thing, I'm NOT paying to post this on these forums...

EDIT: BTW, if the next thing after Vista lacks NTVDM, then something along the lines of DOSBox WILL be integrated, if not by MS, then by a fan who's sick to death of it being impossible to run anything from those days on that system without having to reboot back and forth and close down everything running in the background. Let's just call the project VDMSound^2, shall we?

MS may not care, but, that doesn't mean no one does. I just can't help but think that it could be useful from a software standpoint to take direct advantage of software such as this and stop using things like the NTVDM in favor of the more accurate emulated system to the extent that is needed.

Why would DOSBox have to be integrated into a future Windows OS in order to do what you want it to do? What exactly does integrating mean in this context? Removing cross-platform capabilities and tying the emulator closer to the host OS? I really think that by the time Vista is replaced by yet another version of Windows, DOSBox (or similar projects) will be a lot farther along than you expect.

I wouldn't count on MS bothering to hack together an emulator (or whatever) to support running old Windows and especially DOS applications, except that it might soup up VirtualPC and ship it to corporate customers who refuse to upgrade to the latest version of Windows when they find out it won't run their "legacy" applications.

Er, I don't mean integration as in built into the kernel. I mean as in, well, NTVDM for example. You run a 16-bit application, it automatically runs through there. When it finishes, the NTVDM closes down, frees up memory, etc. The user never has to browse to a folder, execute ntvdm.exe, change over to the dirctory the application is in, and execute that application. A pretty seamless integration. It's not built into the kernel or anything, just a sort of extra that can even be modified by external things such as VDMSound.

Anyway, I was kidding on the MS thing. I'm aware they have been wanting to wipe DOS from the map long ago, but, NTVDM existed because they couldn't quite do it. It's their policy to force people to upgrade because that gets them more money, so, yeah, they will remove all backwards support that they can. I do want to see some companies adopt it though. Do you actually play old dos games? If so, you've probably run into some of the annoying crap many of us have to put up with, such as companies that refuse to make it possible for people to download a game, but, who refuse also to actually sell said game to anyone (say, for example, Daggerfall, though maybe they'll release it like they did Arena EVENTUALLY.) Part of why they do this is that to sell it would be inviting a million e-mails where users complain that sound isn't working right or the video isn't coloring right. Etc. You know, base NTVDM complaints kind of things. If, on the other hand, they package it so that it runs through DOSBox (better yet, integrate the game and program together) then they basically only have to design it to autoconfigure or something like that, then stamp reasonable minimum requirements on it and leave it at that.

This sort of idea isn't exactly very far out. For example, SEGA has done this many times with several of their games (though they don't use the best of emulators, I've been very unhappy with the sound emulation in most of them for one.) Nonetheless, I have bought several packs using this very technology for some of the games that at the time I could not get anywhere else and which would run on my ultra-low-end laptop somewhat (darned thing has to frameskip at NES emulation even.) It's hard to make a profit on such a thing, but, sometimes it's not about making a direct profit. For example, selling Daggerfall would increase awareness of the TeS universe, and make Morrowind look better by comparison (though, this particular example is bad because they'd see all the ways Daggerfall was better too... Most examples like that are an improved thing though.)

It's funny you should mention Daggerfall in the context of bundling old games with emulators or whatever: I think I actually learned about VDMSound because Bethesda was sending free CDs to people that came with VDMSound and some files to help get Daggerfall running under Win2K. All I had to do was send an email, and somebody actually hand-burned, hand-labeled, and hand-mailed it to me from their offices - free of charge. I was impressed.

I agree that DOSBox is pretty hard to use if you're not way into command line interfaces, but I think that too will improve in time. Qbix is considering adding a GUI, and of course there are some excellent front-ends like D-Fend.

Strange. When I wanted Daggerfall so badly, I looked EVERYWHERE and all I found was that they wanted no one to have it for download, but, they weren't selling. This was over rather a long time.

Doesn't speak well that the discs were burned rather than real pressed discs though. That meant right from the start that they had no intentions of it being any kind of permanent thing. Even if they just printed a very small number with the intentions of selling them slowly over a number of years it would have been less cheap sounding. Plus, CDRs -- even the best ones -- have a limited lifetime, whereas a CD-ROM lasts as long as you take care of it.

Anyway, I'm not really talking about DOSBox being hard to use, though I suppose to the average joe user that configuration is going to be pretty mindboggling. I do think that if it were built right into something like I kind of imagined, it wouldn't need individual configurations since most of the configuring would be hardcoded -- such as things like soundcard emulation since you'd want to use a pretty fixed setting to keep average joe mundane from having to understand what ports, irqs, and dmas are. Since it's not a real soundcard, it's perfectly safe to have it default to, let's say sbawe at some standard setting like maybe 220,5,1,5,330,620 or something. Doesn't matter if the user's actual real soundcard is radically different since it's just emulated anyway. The company has only to set their old dos game to a particular setting, fix dosbox so it works with those settings, and, presto, it works on any system with the only possible changes maybe being things like video settings (especially if those pixel shader codes stabilize *crosses fingers*)

BTW, on the commend that virtualization would be nearly useless to the average user, I realized something a bit earlier. This is vastly untrue. Somewhere in the word "virtualization" is hidden the word "java" (you have to REALLY want to see the J, but, it's in there somewhere.) d-: Seriously though, java is currently so massively inefficient that it's quite noticable when you run an equivalent java program next to a native program. Perhaps virtualization WILL decentralize things from the os a bit more by making things such as java closer to a nice proper smooth running application (right now it just uses too much power to do simple things. Don't believe me? Compare Azureus to BitComet among BT clients.) But, it is true that the argument against C/C++ was that they were just too inefficient compared to things like assembly, so maybe the trend will move a bit more towards things like Java as systems grow more powerful, and, I think that virtualization might just help speed that process along nicely.

I still don't see the OS ever dissapearing, and, what's more, dumb terminals just are not designed for the home user at all and will just not happen. While we may move away from native os more, we'll definitely still be doing our own processing, not relying on some server hundreds of miles away -- especially considering that even in such a far off future that such servers are powerful enough to handle it "broadband" will STILL be a problem because you just can't go around laying fiber optics everywhere in the world, and fiber optics would be needed for the kind of latencies that would be required for dumb terminals to ever equal the real desktop. And I don't mean like T1 -- even if the dumb terminal has some basic hardware to do decompression or something, that's still a heck of a lot of data going back and forth VERY fast for even a rather simplistic game. If nothing else, any latency that may occur can be, quite literally, fatal to the game. Even with modern games the latency of the average home user's broadband can be troublesome, and that's assuming future games don't need more input from the user or something (looking at oblivion, I'm thinking RPGs are going to be quite powerful by said future.)

I think you misunderstand - the CD-R they sent me was just VDMSound and some files to supplement the original CD to help you run it under Win2K because the installer on the original CD wouldn't run properly under the NTVDM. I bought the original game when it was new, and I still have the original disc.

About the integration of DOSBox: Ah, so by integration you mean that you want it to be less configurable? I don't think I like that idea... Also, the settings already default to what Qbix and Harekiet have decided are be the best settings for the average DOSBox-supported game running on the average PC.

Programming languages: What I'm seeing is that different programming languages are being used for different things, instead of C/C++ being used for everything like it was for a while. This is probably a good thing. I don't see low- nor high-level languages going away any time soon, though, as they are both very useful for the purposes they serve.

Side note: I use BitSpirit these days when I need to download torrents, as I don't like the idea of a Java BT client for the reasons you've mentioned.

OS-less computing: I don't see this happening in the near future either. It may happen within our lifetimes, but by then we'll all be old and will avoid the newfangled contraptions that our kids/grandkids try to pass off as computers. "When I was your age, we had to store everything on magnetic disks! Uphill - both ways - in the snow. And we were grateful to be able to do it!"

No, by integration I do not mean "configurationless," I mean "not needing a configuration because it's ALREADY configured" with, as I mentioned, possible exceptions of video settings perhaps since those can still change. Things such as soundcards and etc will remain the same. Maybe frameskip, too, though I'm thinking they can a minimum requirement and use 1 or something. So, what you would in effect have is a brand new disc that says "The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall" which, runs a nice little Windows installer when you insert it into the drive if you have autorun on (god that's the first thing I turn off when installing windows) which will then install the usual dos-based files for daggerfall to your harddrive (without having problems with drivers > 2GB I might add) and which will then proceed to run a file, let's say daggerfall.exe (rather than the original dagger.exe) which is dosbox integrated so that it directly runs the one game with specific settings, let's say sb16+mpu 220,5,1,5,330 which don't need to be changed because the program is only running one game, not many, and the host system's actual hardware won't really matter since it all just runs through standard methods.

While they're at it, they can toss on a Linux version and just whatever other ports DOSBox has.

This is just an example off the top of my head. In fact, Bethesda will PROBABLY release it for free download like they did Arena in a year or so or maybe with Oblivion just as a sort of celebration type thing. And it will certainly not have dosbox in any way or form. The most I'd expect is that MAYBE they might say "we suggest using dosbox, which you can find here:" No specifics on configuring it or anything though.

I am NOT talking about an official version of dosbox released which has no configuration file or something.

Anyway, I can't wait to see what virtualization can do for things like Java. Actually, Java DOES have one major advantage, and that's that the whole virtual system thing make is harder to cause really dangerous code (not impossible by any means, but, it does at least get past some of the worst of the problems found most notably in Windows more than anything else.)

Virtualization has nothing to do with java...and it cannot speed it up because javavm is basically an emulator for java bytecode.

I'm sure everybody would want a configurationless dosbox (especially things like cycles, core, etc...) but there's just too many games out there to support with a single configuration (it's not just sb, dosbox also emulates gus, disney, tandy, (mt32), ...)

Does not java work by essentially running a virtual system? I thought I read that back when I had a java class a while back. Would kind of explain certain little things like the way memory has to be allocated to it and such.

And, please stop insisting on believing that I'm saying a configurationless dosbox. I am NOT. I am saying a configurationless Daggerfall, Tyrian, or just whatever other game you can name that works great in DOSBox. I'm saying the companies release their old games with dosbox essentially integrated such that all the end user has to worry over is a single executable and configuration along the lines of things as simple as video resolutions and resize filters and such. DOSBox itself would continue on, completely 100% independant of these things with no realtion to them WHATSOEVER, with it's normal every day configuration exactly as it is currently doing, those things only would have no configuration because it would be dosbox on a per game basis already preconfigured by the manufacturer. No single configuration for all games, individual configurations for each game.

Anyway, it was just an idea. I'd like to refer you all to the SEGA SmashPacks which, as I understand it, were based on the KGen98 code that they bought out (unfortunately, they bought the whole thing, license and all, so kgen died out at that point else today it'd be among the best.) In fact, I have read that they once ran this service with the saturn emulation in which people were able to get online, order a game, and download it, then play via GiriGiri or whatever the name of the saturn emulator they bought (seems SEGA has a habit of this... Heck, maybe they bought out some master system emulators and such at some point too, who can keep up. I'm sure they'll go buy some dreamcast emulator in a few years when they've gotten closer to 100% emulation, though that'd probably be a mistake for them IMO.) This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. There's just no reason companies couldn't do that sort of thing. Just have one big download and it's essentially the game repackaged with dosbox preconfigured (with minimum requirements designed to reflect this) and a very minialistic configuration only for the options that would be needed, which would mainly just be video and frameskip related settings.

Such a thing means no loss of profits due to the cost of producing CD-ROM discs, they don't alienate the people who'd actually rather enjoy trying out ths old game that put them on the map or whatever, and, more importantly, they get to increase awareness of their future products. (For example, I found out about Morrowind because of Daggerfall, not the other way around, so, it's in their best interest that people such as myself should have seen daggerfall before morrowind came out. Had I not played and enjoyed daggerfall so much, I wouldn't have bought morrowind simply because of all the statements about how great it looks and such -- especially considering that at the time I had a mere Geforce 2 GTS.) Well, even if all else fails, it's a tiny 1% profit trickling in anyway, right?

Now, I know there may be more to it than that, the licenses and such may not actually allow for such a direct thing (probably requires that they keep any changes they make to the code they use available for anyone to see, yes?) And it may even just not be possible with the license as it is. This is the sort of thing I'm wondering about though. Not some kind of autoconfiguring dosbox.

Of course java runs in virtual machine but I'm pointing out a difference between virtualization and emulation. DOSBox, VMWare, VirtualPC, java, .net, Xen...those are all virtual machines. But some use emulation, some use virtualization and as I pointed out - virutalization means you are virtualizing the same machine as the one you're running on (this is what VMWare and VPC do), others emulate target platform (as in case of DOSBox and java). The x86 extensions you mentioned only help in virtualizing x86, emulation will still be slow as it is so by design. The best approach (unless somebody figures a new revolutional algorithm 😀 ) in emulating is by dynamic recompilation, this is what DOSBox' dynamic core and java just-in-time compilers do (a very simplified explanation).

I believe that DOSBox already supports what you are proposing. I'm sure you can build a conf file, bundle it together with dosbox and create a shortcut on user's desktop that will run dosbox with the appropriate conf file and executable. Infact I've already done this when I was setting some old dos education applications in an elementary school. Those apps no longer work with ntvdm in XP so I've set them to run with dosbox. An average user will never know the difference 😀

On integration: Ah, I see. While it would probably be possible to reduce the amount of user configuration necessary by customizing it for use with a specific game, it still needs to be tweaked differently to run optimally on different users' systems. For example, surface mode may be much slower than opengl mode on one person's computer, while opengl mode may not work at all on another user's system.

OpenGL and Direct3D would be more like it. D3D may be a bit in beta status and all, but, the only thing that ever ran less than smoothly or unsafely for me was when I tried the 2xSaI shader code (which btw, crashes me even in the author of that particular code's little demo program.) But, by default it wouldn't be using any shaders or anything complicated like that. If I were the company, I'd just have it default to D3D if they have anything but a nVidia card and OpenGL for nVidia cards. And, yes, it would still have to have a very basic configuration such as that, though I do think it should be able to do a basic autodetect so it's not always needed. There really is a minimum of configuration that is needed though when you think about it, and it's actually less than it is for current windows games. There will be no need for the soundcard or anything like that because they'll be fixed. Options like those should be built in so the user can't change them because there's no way to increase quality (maybe with the future exception of MT32 emulation once it's perfected on some few things, such as Sierra's games.) I'm still not sure whether it's better for options like frameskip and emulated cycles to even be configured (this is why I mean for it to have a minimum requirement.) Fact is, some games will run on a pretty low setting and few are out of reach for the average Joe these days. I'm able to play some fairly high end things, but, on AMD's little PR scale, this thing would probably get a 3400+ rating, in other words, it's still a little above where we can expect average joe user to be at (I think average joe may be on athlon 64 3000+ or the equivalent intel by now.) Anyway, such a thing would be decided only if the game even actually needed that much I guess. Many wouldn't.

And, yes, DOSBox CAN currently essentially do this. I've mentioned in other threads (maybe here too? who knows) that one thing I'm doing is keeping a seperate copy of DOSBox in individual game folders with it's own configuration and a batch file designed to run the game through it. Batch file doesn't seem right though, I'm actually wondering if there's any way they could actually combine the two into one executable, but, probably not. Well, the least they could do is make a executable that does the same thing as the batch file. The idea is to absolutely minimize all of the settings and everything so that average joe user doesn't start to feel light headed and tell his friends (also named average joe for some reason) not to buy that particular thing, preferably even so that he tells them that so-and-so is pretty cool for a really old game, so they should maybe try it. (At least, when they get back from the courthouse from changing their names.)

You know that you can just keep one copy of DOSBox and use different config files for each game, right? You can specify which config file to use via a command-line parameter (also works in a shortcut to DOSBox.exe). You can even set up each config file to mount and launch the game automatically by putting those commands in the [autoexec] section.

I know that it's popular to keep different versions of DOSBox around for different games though, so maybe that's what you're doing?

Also, MT-32 emulation is currently discouraged by Roland even though they've pretty much admitted there's nothing they can do to stop it. As a result, the ROMs aren't bundled with any of the incarnations of KingGuppy & canadacow's emulator(s).

I had actually not known of the command line option to do that. It's still worlds easier to just copy over the only files actually needed and a single taylored configuration file in the game's directory and set up a batch file that runs the game directly through it (I know I could have it run through the autoexec section, but, this has the benefit of autoexit on completion for a more seamless feel and it doesn't have to rely on the game being in a particular directory.)

MT32 emulation won't benefit a LOT of games anyway. Just the ones where the authors properly coded usage of all the good things about the MT32. For everything else, the user is better off with MIDI synthesis and maybe some good DLS. Synthesis+DLS can be assumed because those without a MIDI synthesis can use that horrible microsoft directmusic, which is a little less bad once you throw enough DLS at it (ala No One Lives Forever. Most of the music wasn't that great, but, they did amazing things with the title so it's hard even to tell that thing is MIDI and there were some nice little themes, such as the last mission.)

It seemed like Roland and (the real) Sierra had some kind of deal set up. Didn't they sell MT32s through Sierra or something funky like that even? Anyway, the Sierra games are among the otherwise small list of games that do notably better with MT32. Not that you can't get good things out of a MT32 on a huge number of games, just that you can get roughly even out of a proper setup on those that don't use MT32 to it's fullest. I thought maybe the new (fake) sierra would have a fairly easy time at least of doing this, though other companies might find it more tricky. They could then turn around and sell some of the real sierra's games and it actually looks GOOD for roland because people hear what the MT32 was supposed to sound like. So it seems to me anyway.

Yes, Sierra was a visionary company back in the late 80s. They pioneered the now all-but-dead 2D graphical adventure game genre, imported action games from Japan, and brought the Roland MT-32 and the Adlib directly to gamers in an era when everyone was using their horrible internal PC speakers (aka "beeper") for sound. You can thank Sierra for the fact that games started supporting sound cards as early as they did.

Now Sierra has joined the ranks of many other former greats such as EA, Atari, Activison and others as representing little more than a publishing label for a parent corporaton.

HunterZ wrote:

Yes, Sierra was a visionary company back in the late 80s. They pioneered the now all-but-dead 2D graphical adventure game genre, imported action games from Japan, and brought the Roland MT-32 and the Adlib directly to gamers in an era when everyone was using their horrible internal PC speakers (aka "beeper") for sound. You can thank Sierra for the fact that games started supporting sound cards as early as they did.

Now Sierra has joined the ranks of many other former greats such as EA, Atari, Activison and others as representing little more than a publishing label for a parent corporaton.

I was (and still very much am) a big fanboy of the old sierra online. They simply had so much energy and creativity in their games....I just had to play every single one of them. There were the only company (besides apogee) where I could buy based on the logo alone. Its a shame what has happend with Vivendi and all.....and everytime I see that sierra logo on new games it burns me because they use it as a marketing ploy. The sadness? It works....go to the vugames FEAR forum...its a genuine good looking game but some people actually think sierra online makes it 😢

Well, yeah, undoubtedly that's the worst problem. It works. I actually didn't realize at first a good while ago when they had kind of gradually switched over to the entity they are now and I still bought games because I thought they were made by sierra. Took a while for it to finally dawn on me that they weren't really sierra anymore. Still, you'd think more people would have heard about them closing their doors. I already knew it was no longer sierra by then, but, at that point it became impossible to doubt (of course, with things like halflife 2 showing up with that sierra logo on them, it was pretty obvious around that time anyway.)

Frankly, I find it sad that Roland discourages MT32. You know what they could do? Buy the rights to one of the emulation codes and market that. Put a MT32 synthesis in the windows midi list even perhaps, which would essentially emulate much the way Yamaha did with their software XG products (the soundcard in my signature even uses software as I understand it, which is apparently why it's useless for midi synthesis in DOS since DOS doesn't isn't exactly friendly towards a software like that.) People would support it if they did that. If nothing else, all you'd need would be the roms that would come with the module to add on to things like DOSBox, and people would really gladly support it. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about here in my talk of things like dosbox built into the game. Companies are more than happy to complain that people have no right to get this or that product for free, but, they have no interest in making it possible to get that product for non-free when it involves some minor amount of effort like that and their profits won't exactly shoot through the roof... But, how much does it really cost them? All they have to spend on is the emulation part, and that's assuming they wanted it to be theirs 100%. If they were ok with it being the free opensource code, then, well, it costs them nothing. They don't earn a lot, but, they loose even less as the only cost would be maintenance of their online store (which they already have) and bandwidth for the downloads.

I also find the MT-32 emulation issue odd, especially considering the interest people have shown in it. Roland released a Sound Canvas emulator, as well as licensing a Sound Canvas DLS file to Microsoft (which is used by their software synthesizer that comes with all modern versions of Windows and DirectX).

Maybe they just want to bury the MT-32 due to the weak copyright situation. I dunno.

Not just them, all the others who act the same way. They get mad and join the ESA or whatever so no one can touch any of the stuff they won't sell, yet, just as I said, they wouldn't sell it... Even outside of the ESA we have people like Nintendo who know that people just want to play some of those old classics, but, rather than just use some simple free emulation or even actually port the code themselves, they just complain and make stupid statements about how horribly emulation and roms hurts them oh so badly and gives them a bad image (huh?) and other such crap. Guess it doesn't occur to them that some of us liked their classics more than the crap they churn out today. All I know is, not so coincidentally, I haven't had a nintendo system since they finally cut off the SNES (mind you, the reason I didn't get the N64 in the first place was the fact that it just cost so darned much thanks to their decision to stay with cartridges simply because the phillips and sony deals fell through, even though they KNEW consoles were moving to CD-ROM after having to compete with SEGA/MEGA CD and Turbo/PC-Engine Duo. The reason I didn't get one later was because 99% of the games got boring REALLY fast once you got over the initial reation "oh, they made THAT into 3d?" and realized that the game itself was far far worse since it went 3d. Not to mention the complete utter lack of decent RPGs -- and no, Zelda is not an RPG, it's a hybrid, I want the occasional Final Fantasy Tactic or somesuch thank you.)

What I want to see is companies get a little less scared of opensource software doing emulation or other such things, especially considering that in the past years it has increased to new levels. Instead of trying their best to make it as hard as possible for users to legally do things like play a rom of their favorite games when their SNES is broken down beyond repair due to sheer old age, wouldn't they gain more by accepting such things and SELLING those roms? Just say for a moment it did cost too much to try to stop sites from distributing the roms illegally. If they sell them online as a download and can for once stifle their greed just enough that they don't have to make more money than Trump on each little thing they do, they might just learn to enjoy making a little extra profit for doing basically nothing.

Unfortunately, few of them ever listen. So far the only ones brave enough to do it are SEGA and only a few rare others. Unfortunately, SEGA just can't ever seem to get things quite right, so they only serve as a bad example.

And, btw, I wasn't aware that DirectMusic was based on Roland SoundCanvas. Frankly, I'm a little dissapointed. I never had a SoundCanvas and I had thought it was a LOT better than that. The fact is, my sound blasters haven't really sounded notably worse and they are supposed to. Actually, it sounded better to me whenever I listened to midi, but, I do use soundfonts (apx 32MB worth I might add, though I did even on the AWE64 back when I used it in Windows, just couldn't squeeze much into that 512KB and couldn't afford the memory upgrade -- especially since as far as I know there was never a nice proper method made to use soundfonts in dos.)