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Railroad Tycoon II

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Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#111

Post by mnky9800n »

linsomniac wrote: post #36
runlevel1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that the period of time when you got more bang for your buck building a PC with dual-socket Celerons than one high-end Pentium? EDIT: An excellent retrospective on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE-k4hYHIDE

Yes, the dual Celeron 300As, if you could take advantage of multiple cores, were faster than the higher end CPUs, particularly if you overclocked to 450MHz. My box was stable at 450MHz for around a year, then I had to gradually down-clock it, eventually back to 300. Never really did much to track down why that was, just rolled with it and figured I should be grateful for the overclocking I had.

Did you pet you cpus at the end and say something like, “you had a good run boys but we best be putting you out to pasture.”

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#112

Post by mnky9800n »

bombcar wrote: post #49
b112 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate you. Well, just envy hate and just momentarily. Back then, such hacks were harder to find/discover. I would have loved to do that hack, I yearned for true multicpu.

That stuff was all over Slashdot at the time, where I heard about it; even got one and ran it for awhile, eventually relegating it to a Linux server.

For some reason I feel like running home stuff fell out of favour. Or perhaps, I stopped doing it. I would prefer to do it again however I don’t ever have an idea what to do with it since these days I just stream everything from the internet. And I have plenty of cloud compute for whatever I want to do.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#113

Post by mschuster91 »

pjmlp wrote: post #29
mschuster91 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it. Microsoft can't do shit against WINE/Proton legally, as long as either project steers clear of misappropriated source code and some forms of reverse engineering (Europe's regulations are much more relaxed than in the US). The problem at…

They surely can, and Valve got lucky UWP didn't took off as they feared. Microsoft can easily do another go at it. That is the problem building castles on other vendor platforms. As reminder, https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/127475-valve-confirms-ste...

> They surely can, and Valve got lucky UWP didn't took off as they feared.

So what, assuming it had taken off it would just be yet another set of crap APIs to develop wrappers for.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#114

Post by bombcar »

mnky9800n wrote: post #112
bombcar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That stuff was all over Slashdot at the time, where I heard about it; even got one and ran it for awhile, eventually relegating it to a Linux server.

For some reason I feel like running home stuff fell out of favour. Or perhaps, I stopped doing it. I would prefer to do it again however I don’t ever have an idea what to do with it since these days I just stream everything from the internet. And I have plenty of cloud compute for whatever I want to do.

People call it "homelab" or "data hoarding" these days, but yes, the easy access to hours and hours of movies and music was "solved" for the average person by the content streaming sites, so there's not as much a drive as there used to be for it.

Heheheh, drive.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#115

Post by wat10000 »

jncfhnb wrote: post #35
mrighele wrote: post #33

> Indeed, in some of the most difficult scenarios, the efficient operation of your railroad provides no more than the seed capital for the real key to victory, your shenanigans on the stock market. This is in fact what I don't like about RR2. The stock market had too much of a big part in my opinion, and I never enjoyed it. I liked much more Transport Tycoon (and its open source version OpenTTD) which had much more f…

I’ve never played this game but it reminds me of some railroad game I did play where you could put all of your money into a commodity, and that would raise the price of the commodity… which would start causing the overall value of your assets to explode exponentially… which allowed you to justify absurd loans from the bank… which compounded in a loop where you could start to break the math of the game as the price of…

I don’t think you could quite do that in RRT2, but it wasn’t too hard to abuse the system.

The article mentions that the trains are just representative and in-game journeys can take over a year. What you do is, as soon as the game starts, spend every penny of your company’s money on the longest line you can afford, with one train hauling the most valuable cargo. Try to make it take a little over a year to arrive. As the individual you’re playing, sell all of your company’s stock.

Ongoing maintenance costs will quickly put your company in the red. By the time the end of the year comes around, your company is basically bankrupt, and the terrible fiscal report will devastate your stock price.

Now buy all of your company’s stock practically for free. Proceed to the next year, where your train soon arrives, your cargo pays off handsomely, the debts are more than paid, and your company is on a very healthy position with a very healthy stock price. Enjoy the rest of the game with a substantial personal fortune you can pour into your company if you want to focus on building, or use to wreck competitors if you’re up for that.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#116

Post by int_19h »

pjmlp wrote: post #28
baq wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WINE and Proton piggyback on Microsoft's guarantees of Win32 stability. As long as that remains in place (which should be for all intents and purposes forever given MS's customers) they can't really do anything about it. So, next time you hear the joke about Win32 ABI being the only stable ABI on Linux, remember it's funny because it's true!

If all one wants it to run games that use the Win32 API as defined today, surely. If all one wants it to run games that use the Win32 API as defined tomrrow, anyone's guess.

If the API only has additions, then Microsoft would still need to convince game devs to actually use them (and Valve will point out that if they do, their game will not work on Steam Deck, so there's a clear downside).

If some APIs are removed, it breaks older Windows games. I can't think of any historical API that has been completely removed in this way - even stuff like DirectDraw and DirectPlay is still there even though it has been deprecated for decades.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#117

Post by int_19h »

wodenokoto wrote: post #85

The way the author talked about the feeling of if a sequel could live up to the original, and how it had been mostly forgotten, reminded me of Warlords, which together with civilization and rail road tycoon was the main turn based strategy games of my youth. I remember there was a sequel, but it would always freeze up on our computer. ... And I don't think I've stumbled on anyone on the internet talk its praise. Was…

Warlords - especially the second installment - is generally considered one of the 4X classics of the 90s.

The Age of Wonders series was heavily inspired by Warlords (and Master of Magic), and is still around.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#118

Post by BlueTemplar »

kbolino wrote: post #73
Yeul wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft tried to put their games on their own store but they crawled back to Steam. Honestly Windows is more open than MS haters give it credit for.

Yeah, GFWL was a debacle that has thankfully been largely forgotten. If Microsoft couldn't pull it off back then, they're not going to today.

They now own Activision-Blizzard-King, which even now (new Battle.net) is still better than GFWD ever was.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#119

Post by SoothingSorbet »

pxc wrote: post #68
Dalewyn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Windows finally made Year of the Linux Desktop(tm) a reality, Windows is the best desktop Linux distro (Android gets the mobile Linux distro crown).

Windows' desktop environment is much too lackluster for that. It's uniquely inconsistent (many distinct toolkits with irreconcilable look-and-feel, even in the base system), has poorly organized system configuration apps that are not very capable, takes a long time to start up so that the desktop becomes usable, is full of nasty dark patterns, suffers an infestation of ads in many versions. Besides the many issues wi…

> It's uniquely inconsistent (many distinct toolkits with irreconcilable look-and-feel, even in the base system)

While I agree that Windows has long since abandoned UI/UX consistency, it's not like that is unique: On desktop Linux I regularly have mixed Qt/KDE, GTK2, GTK3+/libadwaita and Electron (with every JS GUI framework being a different UI/UX experience) GUIs and dialogs. I'm sure libcosmic/iced and others will be added eventually too.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#120

Post by nsxwolf »

giobox wrote: post #98
olyjohn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem with this setup was that a vanilla Pentium 3 would run circles around the dual Celerons. I had my Celerons clocked to something ridiculous at one point like 600MHz and still could not beat the Pentium.

You are forgetting the massive price difference though. For sure a P3 was great if you had an unlimited budget, but a quick look at pricing sheets for September 1999 shows a 600mhz P3 at ~650 dollars. The 300mhz celerons, easily over-clockable to 450/500mhz, where only ~150 dollars each. These prices are in 1999 dollars too, I haven't adjusted for inflation. It was the value proposition, not the outright performance…

I recall some kind of Intel trade show event where attendees got to buy a P3-500 and an SE440BX motherboard for $250.

It was awesome and was my main computer for years.

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