I guess physical media isn't enough after all...
Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
681–690 of 800 posts
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#682Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't agree at all. Microsoft originally hoped that other vendors office type offerings would be good enough, they weren't (lotus notes) so Microsoft did it themselves. Bill gates also understood the value great programmers. The whole business revolved around this premise. this was different from other software companies at the time. Read the likes of Gabe Newell and Joel spolsky said about their time there. It was i…
I am skeptical of the “backwards compatibility” claims. Often playing older Windows games is easier and more reliable on Linux with Wine/Proton than on Windows 11.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
The bit about SimCity gives an idea of how seriously they took it.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess it’s surprising because how ubiquitous their products are. You’d expect them to be of better quality considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
They're ubiquitous because everyone else fucked up during the 80's and 90's charging too much for everything. MS was affordable. It's really just Apple gaining economy of scale by manufacturing in China and Linux being free while being higher quality that make MS look bad. Also MS stuff has always been slop. Hate their business practices too. But without Linux we'd be choosing between MS, Apple and Oracle Solaris or…
I would much rather have the evolution of Amiga, OS/2 or BeOS, but it is as it is.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the classic BSODs were not all Microsoft's fault, many of them were on 3rd party driver developers. I think the worse thing here is all the subtle breakages and inconsistencies in Windows, as well as in the MS Office suite of products, constant redesigns of things that worked, adding layers upon layers of "make-up" on top that obscures functionality, etc etc.
I think “The Operating System is fundamentally Unstable” is a much bigger problem than “First party applications are redesigned too frequently.”
You're right, of course. The point I was trying to make (badly) is that people have hatred for Microsoft for a lot more than just BSODs of decades ago. There has been bad engineering upon bad engineering for many decades, manifesting in all kinds of ways. And that's what this subthread was discussing, Microsoft being bad.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#685Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are already perfect FPGA emulators of N64 out, why not GameCube.
The MiSTer is already struggling to fit the N64 core, and the GameCube is more than 10 times more complex than the N64. Just the CPU cache and the GPU embedded RAM would be prohibitively expensive to implement on an FPGA, it would require one of the very top of the line FPGAs in the market to even attempt it.
FPGAs are improving exponentially so it is only a matter of time.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work. Office on the web is…
It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
It interesting to see how my kids barely know how computers work, but growning up on DOS, 3.1 and 95, I was basically learning to troubleshoot issues just by trying to us a computer.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
DRM-free was a nice idea 20 years ago, the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all. If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up try…
> None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Stop spreading misinformation. Even if you're a non-techie you can add non-Steam games to Steam's launcher (my extremely tech illiterate friend just did this) and they'll run with Proton. It comes down to a game by game basis, and it's still extremely rare (outside of recent 2025/2026 anticheat AAA title stuff) that any game would have a…
Yeah, of course you can, but that isn't exactly an argument for DRM-free GOG if you need the evil Steam to get your games running, or mess around with DOSBOX, Wine, Heroic, Lutris or whatever else is the workaround of the week. If you want to jump through extra hoops you can strip Steam DRM with a few clicks too.
Meanwhile with Steam you click once and the game runs, since they jumped through all the hoops for over a decade to make that work, while GOG sat around and still hides their MSDOS games in a self extracting Windows executable, that neither runs on DOS nor Win9x.
Anyway, back to the point: DRM-free is just a teeny tiny fraction of what might prevent you from running a game.
Also it's not like GOG is digital rights management free in the purest sense: You still have to have an account and they still track what you own, it just isn't enforced at the .exe level, but it makes things like used games sales still impossible, since you can't relinquish or transfer your ownership.
Overly focusing on DRM-free just misses how the software landscape has changed in the last two decades and what things actually matter.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
The kernel is solid, its all the userspace software where they are fumbling hard.
The kernel is okish. But compared to Linux it is surprisingly bad at a number of things. Handling lots of tiny files in huge directory trees is much slower on Windows than Linux for example. I dont know if that is due to NTFS vs ext4/btrfs/xfs, or if it is some broader issue in the NT kernel. Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windo…
Windows NT kernel is a marvel of engineering. It's incredibly flexible, you can build crazy stuff on top of it without having access to its source code.
As an example, Parallels had a version of Docker-like containers on WINDOWS in 2006! They implemented it as a wrapper on top of the native Windows NT kernel API.
But the downside of this flexibility is relatively slow filesystem operations. It was a conscious trade-off from Windows kernel developers, they thought that flexibility was more important.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Steam machine costs like double an Xbox
Like for an espresso machine or a printer, the incentive is put on the consumables. Peoples trust Steam and their frequent sales, not so much XBox and the rest of the platforms, so if you want to frequently buy a plethora of games, old and new and indie and AAA, it would probably still be cheaper to get a steam machine than the next console with their limited catalogue and fixed prices.
The new games tend to cost the same on both. Some do prefer gaming PCs, others have consoles for cost or ease. Steam Machine doesn't change that, it's another PC, actually a bit harder to use for this cause you're dealing with Proton unless you install Windows.