reviewsnthoughts

 I’m not, by definition, a gamer, i.e., someone who buys a computer with all the bells and whistles that make it optimal for playing the latest computer games and then spends a king’s ransom on every possible game at the local GameStop or Electronic Boutique. 

Once upon a time, though, I was - at the very least - a casual gamer who did have more than a passing interest in motherboards, graphics cards, and, above all, memory chips and CPUs that could manage both the more prosaic business applications a college student/struggling writer needs as well as the coolest flight simulators, strategy simulations, and - yes - Star Wars games.

At first, what some tech experts label “legacy issues” or software-hardware incompatibility didn’t affect me much.  In the pre-Windows era when MS-DOS was the basic operating system, I owned very few IBM/PC games and, because they weren’t as graphics-intensive or memory hogs, they were usually retroactively compatible with newer CPU/DOS combinations.  (In other words, if I bought MicroProse Labs’ Silent Service II or Sid Meier’s Civilization while I owned a an IBM “clone” with an Intel 386 CPU and MS-DOS 3, they’d still run if I upgraded to the next level of CPU and operating system….usually with better performance than on the PC system they had originally been designed for.

It is, perhaps, a computer user’s cliche, but it seems that every 16 months or so, on average, new computer hardware and software is introduced.  Hard drives, which once were measured in mere megabytes in the 1990s, now usually contain several gigabytes of storage space.  The old Intel 386s now seem puny in comparison to the Pentium Dual Cores which have supplanted the x86 series of chips, and video cards now require more power and memory to run 3D graphics that could only be dreamed of by wide-eyed, pie-in-the-sky techno-geeks.

This constant updating and upgrading of technology, while offering 21st Century gamers of all types and skill levels better graphics, better sound, and smarter Artificial Intelligence opponents, does have its unattractive side.

Consider this.  Over the past 20 years or so, the transition of one storage medium to another has meant that I’ve lost the abiility to use a lot of the software I’ve purchased over the years.  I didn’t have too many programs that installed from the larger 5.25-in floppies, but at least one flight sim needed to boot up from the “A” drive, which required that type of diskette.  When PC manufacturers got rid of the 5.25-in drives, I had to stop using F-15 Strike Eagle III.

Now, of course, even the 3.5-in floppies - which look so much like the memory tapes used in the 1960s version of Star Trek - are no longer usable.  The last time I saw a brand-new PC with a floppy drive was five years ago; the Windows version on that - XP - still could run at least one MS-DOS game and ran it well.   Now, even if Vista supported that version of DOS (I think it was DOS 5.0), how would I be able to physically get the software into the PC without a floppy drive.  Now we have CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives; within five years I foresee Blu-ray-ROM drives becoming commonplace.

As accustomed to changes in technology as anyone who grew up in the Computer Age, I still wish that the geniuses at Microsoft would please consider those of us who embrace progress, yet would like, just for once, to be able to pull out a cherished computer game’s CD-ROM and be able to install it onto a system like Vista….without having to say, “Well, at least it can be a nice looking coaster!”