Will This Run on 64-bit OSs?

[hammersinger]

My main machine is a dual-core 64-bit running WinXP 64. Will this game run in this environment?
I have had to abandon several games that do not make the 64-bit cut. I am not interested in multibooting or Win Vista.
best, hammersinger

[Kaeller]

It'll be good to hear some official word about it.

But I'm betting it will, only programs old enough to use 16bit binaries don't run at all on XP 64, unless you use some emulator (DOSBox for example for real old games).

Of course the installer can make things a bit complicated, I've found installers that are told to only accept windows XP/98/95, or, worse yet, use 16 bit code, those are troublesome, but you normally can copy the install directory from a x86 windows machine and it'll work.

[Erik Rutins]

None of our titles officially support XP 64-bit, as we don't have an installation to develop or test with. However, most of our games to my knowledge work fine with it. Caveat emptor.

[hammersinger]

I assume the Matrix Games and related programming houses are aware that 64-bit CPUs are being sold and 32-bit are leaving the planet?* In fact I recently had a board burn out in one of my business machines, which are all Socket-A. I had a hard time finding a newly manufactured Socket-A board.** The only place 32-bit AMD CPUs seem to be available now are from eBay vendors.
Restricting your game development to the 32-bit world would seem to be business suicide at this point. Caveat emptor indeed! You would be smart to port these to 64-bit Ubuntu or some other up and coming free linux distro. Those are designed to multiboot easily as they usually share space with Windows. I only keep Windows for games and my accounting software. There is no other reason for it in my world.

* I believe the famous green wind-up $100 laptop will continue using 32-bit chips from AMD. That audience will not be buying games from Matrix. Too expensive. I support the $100 laptop personally to introduce computing into the poorest corners of the earth. Noble idea.

**ie: A new board I thought might be worth buying.
best, hammersinger

[sabre100]

Most apps will run in 32-bit mode on a 64-bit OS so it should be ok.  However there are few true 64-bit apps out there to take advantage of a 64-bit OS, including drivers.  64-Bit OS is pretty useless IMO at this point until more vendors actually program and develop true 64-bit apps

[Erik Rutins]

Hammersinger,

ORIGINAL: hammersinger
I assume the Matrix Games and related programming houses are aware that 64-bit CPUs are being sold and 32-bit are leaving the planet?* In fact I recently had a board burn out in one of my business machines, which are all Socket-A. I had a hard time finding a newly manufactured Socket-A board.** The only place 32-bit AMD CPUs seem to be available now are from eBay vendors.

Indeed - we do have some 64-bit CPUs and we do have a test installation of Vista 64-bit, but we do not have an installation of XP 64-bit at this time. As far as I know, none of our developers currently have 64-bit OSes installed for development testing either. The vast majority of people are using their 64-bit CPUs with 32-bit operating systems at present though.

Restricting your game development to the 32-bit world would seem to be business suicide at this point. Caveat emptor indeed! You would be smart to port these to 64-bit Ubuntu or some other up and coming free linux distro. Those are designed to multiboot easily as they usually share space with Windows. I only keep Windows for games and my accounting software. There is no other reason for it in my world.

In fact, we're just going with what the vast majority of our market seems to run. 64-bit OSes are historically less supported by a variety of software and hardware vendors. The additional support cost of developing and testing for those has, in the past, been unjustifiable for us. With 64-bit Vista, that may change in the future, but not the immediate future.

The thing is, right now users who are running 64-bit OSes simply need to be more educated about the possible incompatibilities they might encounter. If we see enough of our market moving to run 64-bit operating systems, we will likewise move to make sure we support them.

Regards,

- Erik

[hammersinger]

Eric: I have no doubt that your gang can continue to come up with excuses to look backwards and to market software that is four generations behind what is happening. However your position is that you want to run new essentially legacy software on 32-bit emulators. That is fine. I still enjoy playing Imperialism II on emulation. It is a nice little game that will never challenge my hardware. I would not invest in developing software for fifteen-years dead machines however.
The world is moving on. More computer power leads to more potential in all dimensions of gaming including visual effects, AI complexity etc. The equipment is cheap. My gaming rig has a 1080p-enabled Samsung 22" flat panel which was around $350 from NewEgg, a Brisabane dual core CPU that was around $100, a $110 Asus mobo that does way more than I need. A Radeon 2600 PRO which was probably $100 and a set of Logitech THX Dolby 5.1 speakers that cost $130.00. I recycled all the case-keyboard-mice and drives for this rig so that was all free. A few years ago this sort of capability would have cost several times this price and next year it will likely cost 1/4 of this price. (Samsung just expanded a fab to make 8th generation glass that comes out 52" standard. LCD prices will fall through the floor.) In another year the AMD integrated packages like "spider" or "cartwheel" will deliver massively more computational/video/interactivity than we have now and my little rig will not be competitive. Intel also makes killer processers and lots of them.
So, for all this I can play Imperialism II or some other emulator-encapsulated 1980's game. Great. Maybe I'll go back to Pong. In fact I am thinking about getting an Xbox or a Wii or both. They look like fun.
The reason I asked the question was that I have felt burned by Matrix when I discovered that "Crown of Glory" would not run on this rig. "Well, I thought, they coul not even get that right. Maybe I should ask if this new, rather attractve, Napoleonics game has been tested on 64-bit?" So your response is maybe and maybe not Caveat Emptor. OK, no sale.
Stll looking for good games.
Hammersinger

[Erik Rutins]

Hammersinger,

In response to that, I can only say that if we began to design for requirements such as those you have, we would eliminate most of our market. You might be surprised how many wargamers are way back on the hardware upgrade curve. Frankly, we get quite a bit more in the way of complaints when a game has higher minimum specs than we do when it doesn't exploit the latest and greatest hardware or software.

I understand how you feel, having built such a system, but unfortunately our resources are quite finite and we just can't test (and thus officially support) every configuration.

Regards,

- Erik

[Murat]

We wargamers are not graphic whores for the most part so frequently KISS applies

[JavaJoe]

ORIGINAL: Murat

We wargamer are not graphoc whores for the most part so frequently KISS applies

Amen to that brother, keep the flashing spinning skulls that mutate into kaleidoscope windows looking into the 4th dimension off my screen. I'm happy with the nachos crunching sound of infantry!

[tgb]

If not for Matrix there would be practically no 2007 releases that would run on my aging rig.

[hammersinger]

Eric: I just looked on Pricewatch and some other places. The only supply of 32-bit chips for desktops seem to be in the hands of scavanger houses. They are going for small bucks. This level of technology is no longer being manufactured where it will enter the developed world mainstream market. Therefore Matrix is building fossil programs for a fossil market. When anyone, anywhere in the developed world replaces a desktop rig it will be with 64-bit tech. Similarly the graphics are advancing with more and more GPU capability in chipsets and glue-on mobo chips in the $5.00 range. Some individuals predict that tri-core and quad-core CPUs will have one of the cores be a GPU. There is a limit to what an emulator can do and since Matrix apparently does not even test for compatability on 64-bit you are going to have more customers like me who feel burned by a purchase that does not work on modern tech. I should repeat that my gaming rig is not very sophisticated or powerful or leading-edge. It is trailing edge if anything. Matrix is off the edge.

Regarding GPUs and naive ideas about "graphics whores:" This is not the point. If you would read Alex Saint John* on the evolution of modern gaming you will discover that games are progressively run by the GPUs not the CPU. In a Windows box playing a game all the CPU does, nowadays, is load the OS. Specifically:

"There is another important reason that GPUs have momentum for taking over for the CPU. GPUs are better designed for accelerating tomorrow’s nonenterprise computational problems. ... most games derive little or no performance benefit from being threaded or multicore optimized. One of the reasons for this is that the heavy computational lifting and parallelism is already largely handled by the GPU. ...We evolved massively parallel computing brains to cope with the enormous complexity of the environment we live in. Traditional CPU architectures, on the other hand, were designed with serial processing in mind. Although parallelism was added to them over time to speed them up, a modern computer is essentially an extremely fast serial processing device. Although very powerful, it still requires “unnatural acts” to get modern CPUs to solve real-time parallel processing problems...The GPU’s native architectural advantage for future computing derives from its physics roots. It’s easy to forget that a 3D game is an extraordinary achievement in real-time simulation of optical physics. Early GPUs were really just highly specialized massively parallel physics engines that have evolved greater processing flexibility over time. To stretch the point, a modern GPU has a great deal more in common with the structure of a human brain than the CPU does. It’s no coincidence that the GPU’s ability to “visualize” an interactive real-time 3D world for us has resulted in an architecture with a lot in common with the one we use to visualize an interactive 3D world for ourselves."("The Saint: GPU Dominance", CPU Magazine, October 2007, Vol. 7 Issue 10, print issue page 15)**

So: Not only is the Matrix market a fossil it is using a computational element of the computer, the CPU, which is rapidly becoming obsolete for any serious gaming purposes. Dig it, the parallelism is in the GPU not the CPU. Parallel processing is the future of all nonenterprise computing. All the interesting stuff in the gaming world will eventually be parallel not von Neumann.***

So who would care about this? Aside from old cranks like me who whine about Matrix' shortcomings the whole world is becoing 64-bit enabled. Gaming is a huge marketplace. After security software gaming is the largest aftermarket purchase for typical consumer-level computers. People keep buying games long after they stop buying security software or enterprise software or whatever. Wired Magazine prediced that gaming would be larger than all other forms of entertainment combined in the future (including movies, music and pro sports).

Matrix has competition. The market segment it serves is large enough to attract real competitors whether they write for it or port to it from a console edition or whatever. Avalon Hill and SPI also made great games once upon a time. I purchased my copy of Tactics II (The first mass-market board wargame) from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry store when I was probably age twelve. I have bought and discarded more board wargames than most people can recall. My observation is that all wargame companies commit suicide one way or another. This is unfortunate. It would be nice if Matrix could avoid this common fate.

I should note that as I am writing this I am also downloading a copy of a game from Digital River which I just purchased from the Matrix website. The download is very slow. This may indicate that your current Hiliday Sale is going well. If you do send David Heath out to a shopping mall in a Santa suit will you please have someone take pictures for the website?
Thanks,
hammersinger



*so Google him.

** The Saint is wrong about computers and brains being very similar. This is a common misconception spread by various hucksters, bums and criminals who want the government and dumb businesspeople to give them money to develop "Artificial Intelligence." The brain is primarily an endocrine organ with some computational capacities not a computer-like organ. Consciousness is not like what comes out of a computer multimedia experience. Computers extend human mathematical abilities in business and science applications. Recently computational achievements crudely model interactive environments in games. People who do not get out much may think this is "realistic." They should go for a walk some time. I have visited the oh-so-beautiful and techno-impressive-takes-the-breath-away websites of "Artificial Intelligence" firms and inquired of them: "You are promoting an artificial version of "Intelligence." What do you define as "Inetlligence" real or artificial? So far none of them will respond to my emails. None. These people all know they are selling nothingness.

***von Neumann invented the modern serial-adding-machine CPU.

[dinsdale]

ORIGINAL: Murat

We wargamer are not graphoc whores for the most part so frequently KISS applies

I'd like to be an AI whore though.

hammersingers explanation of future hardware would lead to the elimination of at least one of the poor excuses being trotted out for poor AIs.

I know wargamers appear to be born luddites, but not all change is an evil plot to facilitate FPS

[Veldor]

Hammer,

HP and other Server Vendors haven't made many if any 32bit servers for years yet a vast majority of businesses large and small still install 32bit Windows Server 2003 on their brand new 64bit servers.

The only thing that has changed that trend is a few hard stances by Microsoft to only support 64bit with certain new applications (Like Exchange 2007). These are applications that are so optimized for 64bit, they basically run like crap on 32bit and are thus not officially supported on 32bit.

Until more applications and other items are written specifically for 64bit and with optimization in mind 32bit applications and games will be the standard. Even the Vista installation base is questionable at best so I'm quite positive the 64bit install base is even less (And most especially amongst wargamers).

As you probably know already, another thing that will eventually drive 64bit is the need for Vista Systems with more than 4GB of RAM. However 2GB is around the norm today still so that boundary is still awhile off.

[Ursa MAior]

Hammersinger
 
Dont you have aything else to do than post page long whinings? Why dont yo go somewhere else? A whole bunch of tangos (see AQI/SCIRI etc) are starving for this kind of style but not us.
 
 
 

[Murat]

ORIGINAL: hammersinger
Eric: I just looked on Pricewatch and some other places. The only supply of 32-bit chips for desktops seem to be in the hands of scavanger houses. They are going for small bucks. This level of technology is no longer being manufactured where it will enter the developed world mainstream market. Therefore Matrix is building fossil programs for a fossil market. When anyone, anywhere in the developed world replaces a desktop rig it will be with 64-bit tech. Similarly the graphics are advancing with more and more GPU capability in chipsets and glue-on mobo chips in the $5.00 range. Some individuals predict that tri-core and quad-core CPUs will have one of the cores be a GPU. There is a limit to what an emulator can do and since Matrix apparently does not even test for compatability on 64-bit you are going to have more customers like me who feel burned by a purchase that does not work on modern tech. I should repeat that my gaming rig is not very sophisticated or powerful or leading-edge. It is trailing edge if anything. Matrix is off the edge.

Both AMD and Intel have abandoned tri-core due to Intel's successful "quad" (which is really a double double) marketing. AMD has promised a true Quad in 2008 and Intel claimed the same right after them.

Regarding GPUs and naive ideas about "graphics whores:" This is not the point.

Actually this is the point. GPUs are for GRAPHICS, especially 3D ones. Matrix games resemble board games more than MMORPGs and graphics can be minimal and still provide a desired product

If you would read Alex Saint John* on the evolution of modern gaming you will discover that games are progressively run by the GPUs not the CPU. In a Windows box playing a game all the CPU does, nowadays, is load the OS. Specifically:

"There is another important reason that GPUs have momentum for taking over for the CPU. GPUs are better designed for accelerating tomorrow’s nonenterprise computational problems. ... most games derive little or no performance benefit from being threaded or multicore optimized. One of the reasons for this is that the heavy computational lifting and parallelism is already largely handled by the GPU. ...We evolved massively parallel computing brains to cope with the enormous complexity of the environment we live in. Traditional CPU architectures, on the other hand, were designed with serial processing in mind. Although parallelism was added to them over time to speed them up, a modern computer is essentially an extremely fast serial processing device. Although very powerful, it still requires “unnatural acts” to get modern CPUs to solve real-time parallel processing problems...The GPU’s native architectural advantage for future computing derives from its physics roots. It’s easy to forget that a 3D game is an extraordinary achievement in real-time simulation of optical physics. Early GPUs were really just highly specialized massively parallel physics engines that have evolved greater processing flexibility over time. To stretch the point, a modern GPU has a great deal more in common with the structure of a human brain than the CPU does. It’s no coincidence that the GPU’s ability to “visualize” an interactive real-time 3D world for us has resulted in an architecture with a lot in common with the one we use to visualize an interactive 3D world for ourselves."("The Saint: GPU Dominance", CPU Magazine, October 2007, Vol. 7 Issue 10, print issue page 15)**

So: Not only is the Matrix market a fossil it is using a computational element of the computer, the CPU, which is rapidly becoming obsolete for any serious gaming purposes. Dig it, the parallelism is in the GPU not the CPU. Parallel processing is the future of all nonenterprise computing. All the interesting stuff in the gaming world will eventually be parallel not von Neumann.***

So who would care about this? Aside from old cranks like me who whine about Matrix' shortcomings the whole world is becoing 64-bit enabled. Gaming is a huge marketplace. After security software gaming is the largest aftermarket purchase for typical consumer-level computers. People keep buying games long after they stop buying security software or enterprise software or whatever. Wired Magazine prediced that gaming would be larger than all other forms of entertainment combined in the future (including movies, music and pro sports).

The future of 'modern gaming' is also console based. Far more Wii and Playstation games sell than PC. Ask retailers and they will tell you they move more product for old consoles than for modern PCs.

Matrix has competition. The market segment it serves is large enough to attract real competitors whether they write for it or port to it from a console edition or whatever. Avalon Hill and SPI also made great games once upon a time. I purchased my copy of Tactics II (The first mass-market board wargame) from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry store when I was probably age twelve. I have bought and discarded more board wargames than most people can recall. My observation is that all wargame companies commit suicide one way or another. This is unfortunate. It would be nice if Matrix could avoid this common fate.

You seem to misunderstand what the role of Matrix is. Matrix is a facilitator for devs. People make games that they think will sell and Matrix helps them take their finished product to market.

*snip*

*so Google him.

** The Saint is wrong about computers and brains being very similar. This is a common misconception spread by various hucksters, bums and criminals who want the government and dumb businesspeople to give them money to develop "Artificial Intelligence." The brain is primarily an endocrine organ with some computational capacities not a computer-like organ. Consciousness is not like what comes out of a computer multimedia experience. Computers extend human mathematical abilities in business and science applications. Recently computational achievements crudely model interactive environments in games. People who do not get out much may think this is "realistic." They should go for a walk some time. I have visited the oh-so-beautiful and techno-impressive-takes-the-breath-away websites of "Artificial Intelligence" firms and inquired of them: "You are promoting an artificial version of "Intelligence." What do you define as "Inetlligence" real or artificial? So far none of them will respond to my emails. None. These people all know they are selling nothingness.

***von Neumann invented the modern serial-adding-machine CPU.

Although the single-memory architecture became commonly known by the name von Neumann architecture as a result of von Neumann's paper, the architecture's conception involved the contributions of others, including J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, inventors of the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania. The mistaken name for the architecture is discussed in John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC Computer, part of the online ENIAC museum, in Robert Slater's computer history book, Portraits in Silicon, and in Nancy Stern's book From ENIAC to UNIVAC .

So the short version of all of this is simply that you are asking Matrix (or the game developers that use their services) to jump on in and take the lead where larger companies like EA have failed to. And you think they are being unrealistic? [:-]

[ravinhood]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Hammersinger,

In response to that, I can only say that if we began to design for requirements such as those you have, we would eliminate most of our market. You might be surprised how many wargamers are way back on the hardware upgrade curve. Frankly, we get quite a bit more in the way of complaints when a game has higher minimum specs than we do when it doesn't exploit the latest and greatest hardware or software.

I understand how you feel, having built such a system, but unfortunately our resources are quite finite and we just can't test (and thus officially support) every configuration.

Regards,

- Erik

Hurray for Erik sticking to WHAT WORKS instead of following the pied piper down IT DOESN"T WORK computerland. We can live with 32bit wargames from now till the cows crow. Just because one person has some overblown piece of garbage that only runs 64bit applications doesn't mean everyone has to follow him into the sea of dispair. It is well known that status wargamers do not upgrade or want to have to upgrade their computers every 5 years. I figure around 2010 maybe it will or might be time to move up to something else. But, Matrixgames isn't going to be pushing games out the door every year like this year anyways. So, we all got a huge smorgasborg of wargames this year for our wonderful 32bit OS's to last us a long long time. Those that have 64 bit technology will just have to lump it.

[JavaJoe]

ORIGINAL: ravinhood

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Hammersinger,

In response to that, I can only say that if we began to design for requirements such as those you have, we would eliminate most of our market. You might be surprised how many wargamers are way back on the hardware upgrade curve. Frankly, we get quite a bit more in the way of complaints when a game has higher minimum specs than we do when it doesn't exploit the latest and greatest hardware or software.

I understand how you feel, having built such a system, but unfortunately our resources are quite finite and we just can't test (and thus officially support) every configuration.

Regards,

- Erik

Hurray for Erik sticking to WHAT WORKS instead of following the pied piper down IT DOESN"T WORK computerland. We can live with 32bit wargames from now till the cows crow. Just because one person has some overblown piece of garbage that only runs 64bit applications doesn't mean everyone has to follow him into the sea of dispair. It is well known that status wargamers do not upgrade or want to have to upgrade their computers every 5 years. I figure around 2010 maybe it will or might be time to move up to something else. But, Matrixgames isn't going to be pushing games out the door every year like this year anyways. So, we all got a huge smorgasborg of wargames this year for our wonderful 32bit OS's to last us a long long time. Those that have 64 bit technology will just have to lump it.

Wargamers squeeze the nickle so hard it looks like the Indian is riding a Buffalo.

[donkuchi19]

ORIGINAL: hammersinger

My main machine is a dual-core 64-bit running WinXP 64. Will this game run in this environment?
I have had to abandon several games that do not make the 64-bit cut. I am not interested in multibooting or Win Vista.
best, hammersinger

I am running an AMD 64 Dual core processor (AMD 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ overclocked to run at 2.5 Ghz with 1 gig of RAM). I only have Windows XP professional and not the 64 but it runs fine for me as a beta tester. I don't know much about XP 64 but if you can emulate my setup, you should be fine. (GeForce 7900 GS video card 256MB)(RealTek Sound card)

[zenmaster]

Hammersinger,

It sounds as if you are really behind the times and confused about computer technology.

First, Windows XP-64 was never more than a niche OS, far more of a niche than even Linux.
Few software companies will even consider looking at certifying software to run on it.
The reason it never saw the light of day was the arrival of Vista.

If you choose to run an OS used by a minute part of the computing industry, you can't expect everyone to flock to your door.
64-Bit computing does very little for the majority of users.
This is why even you will not find Vista-64 as even an option on most new computer systems.

Furthermore, the GPU is NOT where the computational direction is going in the industry.
A few years ago, that is where many people thought things were going, but the industry has reversed course.

The concept of physics on GPU has been a failure and the focus is now moving back towards off-loading that back onto the the CPU.
Most games see a big boost from Dual-Core Graphics, but less so from Quad due to the limits of the threading of the gaming engines.
As new engines are developed they will make more and more use of the extra cores.

Futhermore, many of these games focus on graphical output and not AI.

I rarely post, but you have inspired me.
I work for a software devleopment firm myself and I have 13 Different Operating Systems that I have running on computers in my Office that I need to deal with in regards to supporting our software. However, Windows XP-64 is NOT one of those. The key for supporting all of these OSes is not even in dual-booting my friend. It's in Virtualization. It's a glorious thing.

So amusing you talk about getting with modern technology, but you are so far behind yourself.