The Last Days of Windows 7

[Krios]

Yeah, that is why I want to wait and see if it's true or not. Emulation has always interested me, so it piqued my curiosity to see how that would work.

 

[cluberti]

Given the 360 hardware and how hard it is to emulate a NES (properly) even on today's high-end kit, I'd say "not well indeed" .

 

[Krios]

Well Microsoft did make the 360, so they's probably have a easier time making an actual emulator.

Seems like so much work though when they can just make actual PC ports. Which seems much more likely in my opinion. :sarc:

 

[cluberti]

Emulators have issues across different hardware/processor types not because people don't understand the hardware, it's because emulating timing and certain features (especially when going from a RISC architecture, like the PPC, to a CISC architecture, like Intel x86) can be downright impossible or so processor intensive to emulate that they can't feasibly be done.

Again, if the game was written in Visual Studio using the XNA toolkit and written to DirectX, it can be ported fairly easily (and that is one of the reasons that toolkits like XNA exist). If it wasn't, then you're looking at either some rewrite or emulation, neither of which are appealing to most developers ).

 

[iRHardcore]

IMO, the only thing that isn't perfect with 7 is it's looks.

I think Windows 7's look aren't bad! They're smooth and work well. As for Windows 8 so far, I think it looks terrible.

I know I definetelly prefer 7 to Vista, but I think I'll also prefer 7 to 8.

 

[carwiz]

There would be only one feature that MIGHT draw me to Eight--The ability to read/play/write/burn Blu-ray via WMC and WMP. Other than that, I have no use for it. Xbox? Whoopy-Do!

 

[Corazon]

Given the 360 hardware and how hard it is to emulate a NES (properly) even on today's high-end kit, I'd say "not well indeed" .

Seriously? If you were talking about consoles such as the Sega Saturn or Dreamcast, I'd totally agree. But the NES? It's as easy to emulate as a Commodore 64, and that one's been done to perfection even on PC systems that are antiquated by today's standards (I'm talking Pentium-II 300MHz here).

 

[cluberti]

Perfection? You might want to read up on all the hacks to make things work, and what happens to even a high-end system when you emulate the NES *exactly*. It's not pretty.

 

[Corazon]

Maybe our ideas of perfection are different. Hmm. Truth is I've used C64 emulators more than NES emulators, but always thought both ran just fine.

Sorry, nevermind.

 

[cluberti]

No worries - it's just that most emulators do things differently to try and make things work. Emulating even that simple of a system exactly as it was designed is actually quite difficult (partially because the hardware in a gaming console is usually very specialized and customized, and partially because making a different processor architecture emulate something that custom requires either a LOT of horsepower, or emulation tricks to avoid certain issues). You either have something that runs with decent speed but doesn't exactly emulate the original environment and has bugs (which can cause issues in the games that then run in the emulator), or you emulate the original hardware perfectly, bug for bug, and you end up with something that's much more difficult for the non-like hardware doing the emulation to achieve.

For example, Nestopia is probably the most accurate emulator available to the original NES design, and requires anywhere from 800MHz to 1.5-1.6GHz of Intel x86 CPU power to properly emulate the equivalent of a TI graphing calculator. The developer of this has moved to SNES emulation (again, as close to the original as possible), and has found that he needs 3+GHz on an Intel platform to approach being proper emulation of the SNES hardware. That gaming console hardware was from 1990, and had hardware for CPU and audio that ran at ~21MHz. Again, the issue isn't speed, it's timing and accuracy - that hardware, while paltry in speed, was highly optimized to do what that device did. Emulating something from 1990 at about 21MHz takes upwards of 3GHz on today's hardware.... Interesting, no?

 

[Vince53]

As much trouble as MS has had getting people off of Windows XP, wait until they try to get them off of Windows 7.

 

[arkhi]

I'm not sure about SNES, but I'm pretty sure PS2 and PS1 emulations goes fairly well. I have such emulators and I play a lot of games in them.

As far as X360 on Windows goes, well the X on XBox did come from the X in DirectX. I don't have much info on the archetecture of the Xbox360 Processor and its GPU so I'll stop here..

But either way, I think MS knows its products well and I think they can do it.

Oh, and there's a 360 emulator available out there somewhere too btw.

 

[FranzB]

Let's forget about the details of W7 and what new gadgets Microsoft put into it.
As usual there have been an unbelievable number of updates necessary to remove bugs and plug up holes. Just google for the problems with this Broadcom (Bluetooth).

Why another new OS? Very simple: W7 requires updates which do not bring in any money. A new OS does bring in new money but with it the story starts all from scratch again: updates, updates, updates.
It would be better to improve the old OS (W7). It's as with the old car industry years ago. When you looked at the tv ads for the new models in November and you had a one year old car you got the impression that you were driving an old wreck that had to be transported to the scrap yard.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi all
I for one have tried the Preview of W8 -- and as much as I think W7 is great I really LIKE what I've seen so far of W8.

I'm not bothered about tablets actually which is probably the market W8 is attempting to capture --- I defy any body out there who possessess a LARGE decent monitor to use the Touch screen facility if it has one for a day or two when they need to create proper spreadsheets, presentations, or edit / use graphics such as photoshop -- apart from tiring arm ache why would you want your expensive cinema sized monitor smeered with greasy fingerprints.

For smart phones and things like Ipads / tablets touch screens are fine and W8 will be fine for these.

Unlike a lot of people however I actually LIKE the whole Metro ui thing and provided the apps are available by Mouseclick as well as by touch it will be great.

My testing with W8 is that it's extremely stable, boots up on a conventional drive about as fast as W7 does on an SSD so it's QUICK and is ready to use even faster than W7 and hasn't had any major glitches so far on my system.

It needs some changes (probably better to see the W8 forum for a discussion on these) but W8 IMO is definitely building on W7's success and will probably be even more successful.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[dustywoodworker]

No body ever mentions CPM anymore.:sarc: That's where my roots were grounded.

 

[EarlGrayHot]

I hope W8 with bring back the ability to sort files however we want instead of forcing the user to sort alphabetically with no other option. I hate Windows 7 for that reason alone and will stick to old XP if this is what I get by upgrading.

 

[cluberti]

As posted elsewhere, explorer has a myriad of sort options, you just aren't using them.

 

[stve]

As posted elsewhere, explorer has a myriad of sort options, you just aren't using them.

Windows Explorer is OK but Internet Explorer 9 is pathetic searching history with the View by Order Visited Today option is so stupid. I wonder who the stupid imbecile is who added today on the end . As soon as it turns midnight you lose it all.

No way I'll be moving over to Windows 8 unless they make the interface for desktop users at least as good as Windows 7 , I have a very expensive 26" monitor I use mainly for Photoshop anybody leaving greasy finger marks on it will be in grave danger of having them cut off.

 

[Corazon]

For example, Nestopia is probably the most accurate emulator available to the original NES design, and requires anywhere from 800MHz to 1.5-1.6GHz of Intel x86 CPU power to properly emulate the equivalent of a TI graphing calculator. The developer of this has moved to SNES emulation (again, as close to the original as possible), and has found that he needs 3+GHz on an Intel platform to approach being proper emulation of the SNES hardware. That gaming console hardware was from 1990, and had hardware for CPU and audio that ran at ~21MHz. Again, the issue isn't speed, it's timing and accuracy - that hardware, while paltry in speed, was highly optimized to do what that device did. Emulating something from 1990 at about 21MHz takes upwards of 3GHz on today's hardware.... Interesting, no?

Sure is It's quite a similar situation with the Sega Saturn which still isn't emulated anywhere near well enough to really be able to play the majority of its games. The architecture was quite complex for its time, including two Hitachi SH-2 CPUs running in tandem but sharing cache between them - only one CPU at a time could access that cache. The makers of one of the best Saturn games ever, Radiant Silvergun, said they were able to get 1.8x the performance out of these dual CPUs as they would have with a single one, but it took a lot of tricky coding to even do that.
One of the reasons the PS1 quickly took the lead - it was a lot easier to write games for.

What? Oh, sorry...right. This is a Windows 7 forum, not an arcade hell.

 

[PLRX]

I hope W8 with bring back the ability to sort files however we want instead of forcing the user to sort alphabetically with no other option. I hate Windows 7 for that reason alone and will stick to old XP if this is what I get by upgrading.

I agree, just got W7 last week and I do miss the way XP worked for me. I bought this new laptop because I ran out of hard drive memory and the lap top was 6 years old but, it was working like a charm.