PC Gaming

Gaming on PCs as opposed to Dedicated Game Consoles has been a game of catch-up in the last five years or so. Evan Kirchhoff at 101-280 writes about it and his experience with Valve -- a leading PC gaming company:

PC Gaming: Not Yet Dead Enough, But I Think If We Hit It With The Shovel A Few More Times It'll Stop Moving
At a friend's house last night, we were looking at his new XBox 360 and 42" TV (verdict: you should buy both items immediately; either one taken individually may be less fun), and he was talking about how he'd finally converted to console gaming after one too many sessions wrestling with warring Windows drivers. I nodded smugly: yeah, I've heard of other people being confused by their computers.

Newly inspired by the general notion of "playing videogames", I went home and tried to finally finish off Half-Life 2, a good game I set aside at the 2/3 point earlier in 2005. Apparently I will now never be able to finish Half-Life 2, because the clever automated "Steam" engine that automatically downloads game patches from Valve has decided to patch my game to a point that is not compatible with my current Windows XP graphics drivers, and ATI's graphics driver upgrade system is too much of a miserable shambles to work successfully for a Radeon 9800 card that is for god's sake almost 2 years old now, unless possibly I also install a newer Windows service pack, which then introduces the issue of potentially breaking some of the software I actually need to work on to make money, and at this point I refer you to the technical bulletin "Fuck You, Valve".

I've grown used to the idea that updating a Windows machine will break all previous game software -- I'm down with that. But even with this machine frozen into a specific, favored state (no, I don't allow "Windows automatic updates", or for that matter random hobos sleeping in my car), I evidently have once-perfectly-functioning games that are unilaterally breaking themselves when I'm not looking.

What he is experiencing is a symptom of a significant problem. Microsoft does everything they can to make sure that your application will work just fine on the current version of Windows but there is no guarantee that it will work for future updates, patches or versions. A software manufacturer needs to re-submit their application each time a new patch comes out to have it tested. And this ignores the interaction between dumb-ass software and other applications. Some software will only work with a specific version of the Windows file xyzzy.dll so guess what, it uploads that version to /windows/system32 and overwrites what may be a newer version that another application depends on (or a version that was uploaded to correct a security problem). When I was first getting involved in computers, back in the CP/M and MS-DOS era (yeah, I know...), an application lived in a folder. All of the drivers lived in that folder as well. Nothing was written to the system folders. If you wanted to delete the application, you deleted that folder and it was totally gone. I love the fact that this is still true in a large part with Linux. The few Windows applications I have written use this programing style as well. It is not hard to do...

October 2022

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
            1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31          

Environment and Climate
AccuWeather
Cliff Mass Weather Blog
Climate Depot
Ice Age Now
ICECAP
Jennifer Marohasy
Solar Cycle 24
Space Weather
Watts Up With That?


Science and Medicine
Junk Science
Life in the Fast Lane
Luboš Motl
Medgadget
Next Big Future
PhysOrg.com


Geek Stuff
Ars Technica
Boing Boing
Don Lancaster's Guru's Lair
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
FAIL Blog
Hack a Day
Kevin Kelly - Cool Tools
Neatorama
Slashdot: News for nerds
The Register
The Daily WTF


Comics
Achewood
The Argyle Sweater
Chip Bok
Broadside Cartoons
Day by Day
Dilbert
Medium Large
Michael Ramirez
Prickly City
Tundra
User Friendly
Vexarr
What The Duck
Wondermark
xkcd


NO WAI! WTF?¿?¿
Awkward Family Photos
Cake Wrecks
Not Always Right
Sober in a Nightclub
You Drive What?


Business and Economics
The Austrian Economists
Carpe Diem
Coyote Blog


Photography and Art
Digital Photography Review
DIYPhotography
James Gurney
Joe McNally's Blog
PetaPixel
photo.net
Shorpy
Strobist
The Online Photographer


Blogrolling
A Western Heart
AMCGLTD.COM
American Digest
The AnarchAngel
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Babalu Blog
Belmont Club
Bayou Renaissance Man
Classical Values
Cobb
Cold Fury
David Limbaugh
Defense Technology
Doug Ross @ Journal
Grouchy Old Cripple
Instapundit
iowahawk
Irons in the Fire
James Lileks
Lowering the Bar
Maggie's Farm
Marginal Revolution
Michael J. Totten
Mostly Cajun
Neanderpundit
neo-neocon
Power Line
ProfessorBainbridge.com
Questions and Observations
Rachel Lucas
Roger L. Simon
Samizdata.net
Sense of Events
Sound Politics
The Strata-Sphere
The Smallest Minority
The Volokh Conspiracy
Tim Blair
Velociworld
Weasel Zippers
WILLisms.com
Wizbang


Gone but not Forgotten...
A Coyote at the Dog Show
Bad Eagle
Steven DenBeste
democrats give conservatives indigestion
Allah
BigPictureSmallOffice
Cox and Forkum
The Diplomad
Priorities & Frivolities
Gut Rumbles
Mean Mr. Mustard 2.0
MegaPundit
Masamune
Neptunus Lex
Other Side of Kim
Publicola
Ramblings' Journal
Sgt. Stryker
shining full plate and a good broadsword
A Physicist's Perspective
The Daily Demarche
Wayne's Online Newsletter

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on January 5, 2006 10:02 PM.

Hacking the Senseo Coffee Maker was the previous entry in this blog.

Microsoft and WMF vulnerability is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Monthly Archives

Pages

OpenID accepted here Learn more about OpenID
Powered by Movable Type 5.2.9