hello. I am starting to write my own game engine, and I just though of something as I was doing this, and though that the expertise of everyone here could help me. With this game engine, I am going to use DX 7. I was listening to " Call for Help " and " The Screensavers " on ZDTV and they said that Windows 2000 does not support anything that is 16 bit. Now the game that I am writing will not be sixteen bit, however, I also heard that 2000 is not a gaming kind of OS. If 2000 becomes the dominant, which I suppose it will, as did 95 over 3.1, and 98 over 95, then will the DirectX Game engine that I am writing basically become useless ?? Or would I have just have to convert my code. Any and all comments will be greatly appreciated on this topic. Thanx for your time !

When they say, won't support anything 16 bit, they mean basically that it won't run anything compiled for DOS. Your DirectX program won't compile for a target other than 32 bits, so you're safe.
The claim is that Windows 2000 will run any DirectX 7 game. It hasn't been proven yet, seeing as Windows 2000 hasn't been released (unless I really am living in a hole in the ground), but your code should work with no modification on Win2000 machines.

Edited by - SiCrane on 2/3/00 1:28:30 PM

Right now, Win 2k''s latest beta doesn''t hold much hope for Win 9x based games. GameSpot recently tested 2000 based on game performance, the results sad. Many 9x games [like many 9x apps] wouldn''t run and those that did were horribly slow.
_This doesn''t mean that when Windows 2000 is released on February 17th [or whenever] that it won''t be drastically improved. But given Microsoft''s track record, I don''t expect the first edition to be that much better than the beta''s have been.
_NT based and NT compatible applications [including games] are a whole other story. From what I''ve read, a good percentage of these not only run on 2k but are faster. This just proves that 2000 is really more suited to be NT 4''s replacement than 98''s.

I hate to disagree with GameSpot (they are normally pretty good), but I''ve been using Windows 2000 since beta 3 - and it runs most of the games I''ve thrown at it really well. Ultima IX is actually faster and more stable than under 98, largely because Win2k''s memory manager succeeds in squashing some of the memory leaks! I''ve also had Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, Diablo, Starcraft, the recent Soldier of Fortune demo, Civ 2, Alpha Centauri and a few little shareware programs running without incident - and plenty fast enough. Admittedly, I have 128 Mb of RAM - much less than that, and you''ll be getting a little too much swapping for Win2k to perform well - but thats true of NT, too.

Win2000 does require that programmers avoid some of the cheap speed increases that have been popularized by some gaming sites. For example, acquiring a pointer to a surface [in system memory] and keeping it - rather than using locking - used to be justified with the excuse "you don''t really think that Windows will move this memory, do you?".... Well, Windows 2000 will move it. (Win9x could move it, but its memory manager tended not to).

There have been some issues with early drivers for some pieces of hardware with Win2k. Early TNT2 drivers were pretty slow - although the latest ones, alongside the final release candidate - are fast.

Windows 2000 is a wonderful OS. Its fast, stable (my machine reports 4 days of uptime currently), robust (I''ve been using VC++ to write DirectX software all that time) and has a number of useability enhancements that makes it light-years ahead of NT. On the other hand, if you didn''t need/like NT - you probably don''t need 2000.

The focus of Win2K isn''t consumer gaming, but it is very good for game development (and development in general.) A lot of professional developers are using it to develop their DX 7 games.

A lot of Win9x games don''t run under Win2K, but you have to remember that they are two different OSes. Older games that used DX didn''t target WinNT, and thus couldn''t (or didn''t) test under that OS. There are enough subtle differences between the OSes to cause a Win9x game to fail to run on Win2K.

Games that were originally developed to run on WinNT (like Quake III, Unreal, etc., either using OpenGL or Glide) run fine on Win2K.

After using Windows 2000 build I-dunno-which-one....and had to log in, it crashed, so....it definitely has the windows-like style.

When Microsoft releases win2k on wednesday 15 feb in europe...
it has some major changes with previous versions. Like it doesn''t work with the dos extensions, and doesn''t do any dos stuff at all. The rest is basically the same as with windows NT.
They also said it is developed for professionals....but who are professionals? Professional developers? Companies? Or someone who''s at home doing the administration for some club.....or.....is it for gamers???

I haven''t done any games on the notebook yet (company-notebook......most expensive thing we have since it has special hardware and stuff)......but what I just read looks like it is just perfect for it....

Dance with me......

http://members.xoom.com/CJdeVos/index.htm

Well, I''ve never used it, so I won''t render an opinion, but I''ve read that it is not great for games. It is a buisness OS, to replace NT. MS is working on Windows Millenium (WinMi I think they call it) which is going to be the replacement for 98. Or so I''ve heard.

I have been using Windows 2000 for 5 months (since RC2) at work. We play games at work on a regular basis and many games have worked perfectly.

My experience is that Windows 2000 is in fact a good gaming platform.

The only problems I have found is that some games don''t install or run because they specificaly check to see if they are running under Windows NT and keep you from going any further. The few games that I have seen actualy crash on Windows 2000 (only 2, Baldur''s gate and BattleZone2) probably crash because of sloppy programing.

Windows9x tends to spoil us programmers because it hides more of our dumb mistakes than NT will. People seem to think that because you get a GP Fault when running some app in NT and not in 9x that NT is not stable. Not true. It is actualy one of the features that makes NT more stable than 9x. In the entire time I have been running 2000 I have never seen a BSOD. I write system level software for NT, and if anything stresses an NT system, debugging a broken service is it.

Windows 2000 is a step forward for Microsoft, and I am alot more pleased with it than I was with NT 4

Also, don''t beleve all the hype about 2000 needing tons of memory and disk space. I have seen people (mostly Linux users) going on and on about 2000 needing 128 mb of ram to run. This is true if you install the fullblown Advanced Server edition, But the requirements of Windows 2000 professional are almost identical to those of NT 4. Workstation, and will run very nicly on a machine with a PII 233 with 64mb ram and a 2.5 gig hardrive. A modest system by todays standards.

If you are worried about buying 2000 then wait about 6 months. The support for it will come as more and more game developers start writing games on it. It is an excelent development platform for DirectX and don''t think for a second that game developers won''t notice.