Re: is nmi translator off limits? -- MI400

It's not really a cop out, IMO.  I'm a gamer myself.  I have a 
fairly decent, 80% of max speed at the time.  Game works fine,
looks good.  Then they come out with an expansion pack.  Requires
more video memory.  But it looks SO much better.  And they are
able to do so much more.  With they older computers, they just
couldn't do it.  Then they came out with yet another expansion
pack and, you guessed it, it looks incredible, but now requires
even a beefier machine.

The fact is, you are not going to get realistic looking 3d rendering
in real time at a very high FPS on an 8088 no matter how you code 
it, even at the system level.

Speaking of which, we were using Netscape mail here and had fairly
low end machines with only 32 megs of memory working fine.  Then we
merged with another company that uses Lotus Notes.  We install Lotus
Notes on all the PCs and find that our PCs are now horrendously slow,
we have to slap another 64megs in each computer to bring them up to
96megs, now Lotus Notes runs fine again.

It's not only a Wintel issue and it's just the nature of the game.

Modern day AS/400s can do so much more than years ago.  More DASD,
more speed, more memory, more connection options, more sessions,
etc.

If you want, grab an old S36 box (which I equate to an 8088) and write
down to the bare metal, you still won't get that box to be able to do
1/8th what a modern day AS/400 can do.

Regards,

Jim Langston

Me transmitte sursum, Caledoni!


jamesl@hb.quik.com wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 11 May 2001 10:32:36 -0400 "Steve Richter" wrote:
> > Any performance
> impact . . . is corrected by next years higher speed cpu.
> 
> This is exactly
> the same cop-out that Microsoft has been using for over a
> decade. It's the
> reason why people buy Pentium 4 systems for their homes to run
> gameware that
> won't run on last year's state-of-the-art Pentium III business
> systems. It's
> the reason why perfectly serviceable 8088, 8086, 286, 386, 486,
> Pentium,
> Pentium Pro, and Pentium II desktop systems (not to mention
> 
> IMPI-architecture and even early-RISC AS/400s) are going into
> landfills.
> 
> For my part, I take great pride in the fact that even the newest
> release of
> QuestView (with support for exceptions thrown by database trigger
> programs,
> automatic splitting of "huge" fields, and a utility for
> automatically creating
> join logicals, among other new features) will still
> run, with reasonable
> response times, on a V2R3 D02, that ThinView will run
> on a V2R3 200, and that
> my DOS applications will run on most of the DOS
> machines in the aforementioned
> landfill.
> 
> --
> James H. H.
> Lampert
> Professional_Dilettante
> http://www.hb.quik.com/jamesl

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