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Spin is spin, but...Spin is spin, but...Posted Oct 19, 2008 20:59 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Spin is spin, but... by tialaramex Parent article: Linux now an equal Flash player (Linux-Watch)
It's easy to verify that Enemy Nations isn't a Win16 game at all, it's a Win32 game carefully tailored to use the subset of Win32 that was available through Win32s, a 32-bit flat memory runtime for Windows 3.x that Microsoft made available to encourage transition. Ok, you are right. By the 1997 games dropped support for 16bit systems. I've tried to recall what I've played back then and found that most games were already 32bit or in few cases used Win32s... 1995 was the time when I've switched from 286 to 486 so I can not be too sure if games in 1996 and 1997 used Win32s or not. Before than they were 16bit as rule - only few notable exceptions (like Doom in 1993). To effectively cope with 2-4MiB of RAM was too much for 16bit mode. It means we can be pretty sure transition to 64bit systems will happen when typical RAM in desktop will pass 64GiB or 128GiB. That's few years yet... We don't have many server systems with 128GiB RAM today let alone desktops/laptops... This hard disk is more than a thousand times bigger than the first one I owned, yet the number of /files/ on my current disk is only 400 000. Did I really only keep 400 files on my first hard disk? I'm pretty sure you have many times more than 400'000 files on your disk if you'll count files stored in archives (like .ods or .tbz2) separately. It makes sense for a filesystem (disk is very slow and CPU is fast) but not for memory (CPU is not that fast... yet). And even that changes nothing: even if we'll assume that objects are growing in size two times per five-six years (average size of file 20 years ago was 50-60KiB, today it's more like 1MiB) it buys your technique one doubling time - 1.5-2 years. The facts is: it's the trick of the same style as pread/pwrite wrappers. Why exchange one trick for another if it buys you pretty limited time? When you can safely drop BOTH tricks it'll make sanse - but this time didn't come yet. Stories like this one will not promore 64bit software at all. You need more then 4GB of RAM for the 64bit more to shine, perhaps as much as 32GiB or may be even 128GiB. Till then... a lot of software writers will not care, most users will not care either.
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