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This is why “warning. Game needs 64 mb and you have -2gb continue y/n?” Is better than just dying out.
In commercial software where your users will say "Y" even when they have 16MB of RAM, have an awful time, waste your money calling your support in that unsupported configuration (and forget to mention it), and leave negative reviews - no, hard blocks make a lot of sense.
This is why “warning. Game needs 64 mb and you have -2gb continue y/n?” Is better than just dying out.
In open source software where you can throw it over the fence and say "no warranty", perhaps. In commercial software where your users will say "Y" even when they have 16MB of RAM, have an awful time, waste your money calling your support in that unsupported configuration (and forget to mention it), and leave negative reviews - no, hard blocks make a lot of sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In open source software where you can throw it over the fence and say "no warranty", perhaps. In commercial software where your users will say "Y" even when they have 16MB of RAM, have an awful time, waste your money calling your support in that unsupported configuration (and forget to mention it), and leave negative reviews - no, hard blocks make a lot of sense.
How does the hard block prevent wasted support time and negative reviews?
"On Tuesdays when I alt-tab to Backgammon, my save file is corrupted" is much tougher to immediately identify as out of memory.
Telling users no at the beginning yields far fewer negative feelings than letting them get invested and then experience a major problem, blocker, or just constant random irritations
The actual debugging war story (decompiling an old InstallShield installer and detailed examinations of a routine that presumed that 64MB was more VRAM that anyone would _ever_ need) was quite good too.
If anyone wants to do this kind of reverse-engineering for a living, we’re hiring at CodeWeavers: https://www.codeweavers.com/about/jobs
This reminded me of work I did for Proton/Wine a few years back: finding a buffer overflow in the Rockstar Games Launcher installer NSIS script, having to implement an ancient deprecated Windows named pipe mode that RGL uses, reverse-engineering the VRAM display/detection in GTA IV… If anyone wants to do this kind of reverse-engineering for a living, we’re hiring at CodeWeavers: https://www.codeweavers.com/about/jobs
Once in a while I try some of my father old games with my steam deck ('90s game like the OG Colin Mc Rae Rally or the early Need For Speed games)and I'm impressed how they work with basically no issues on current-gen devices.
I'm intrigued why MS decided to have GlobalMemoryStatus return a negative number if there is more than 4GB, rather than returning the maximum value.
The actual behavior of GlobalMemoryStatus is a bit more complicated, see https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/archive/ftp.microsoft.com/MISC/KB/....
I'm intrigued why MS decided to have GlobalMemoryStatus return a negative number if there is more than 4GB, rather than returning the maximum value.
I think it's worse than that. It returns the max value (2GB) when there is more than 2GB but less than 4GB, but a negative value if there is more than 4GB.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just don't read their poetry.
Honestly the Vogons were only the third worst poets in the universe. If you can read awful human poetry like anything by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings, they won't faze you.
Was just going to post this but you beat me to it! This was a fun read, and introduced me to vogons where I think I'll be spending some time.
Vogons is a great place with lots of experts on vintage software and hardware. Definitely recommend it to anyone interested in either running old stuff or just on history/tidbits/how-things-worked like that post.