Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 05:53:40 10/11/00
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> Rebel Century runs in a DOS window too. I have no problems at all running > Century under W98, ME and W2000, with anything up to 200MB hashtables on my > 256MB machines. Did you run its built in speed benchmark in a DOS Box vs stand-alone DOS? The old Rebel 10 used to run at least 5% slower in a DOS Box than in stand alone DOS, even when the stand alone mode was deliberataley crippled to use only half the RAM for hash (to match the Windows DOS Box environment). The unfortunate occurence with stand alone DOS mode is that if for some reason there is a crash while inside DOS, Win95/98 would often keep rebooting back to DOS, refusing to go into Windows mode (until config & autoexec were restored, provided you planned for this and made a backup in advance; alternatively one can boot through "safe mode" and fix it there). A while back my brother, who was a novice computer user, got locked out of Windows98 after a stand-alone DOS chess program crashed. The system kept booting back to DOS. Since his internet email was in Windows, he couldn't email me for instruction how to get Windows to boot. So he had to make an international phone call from YU (very expensive under the economic sanctions) to ask me how to coerce Windows to come back. It wasn't a direct fault of the chess program, but rather one of those Microsoft machinations to "help" users migrate quicker away from DOS. But given that Microsoft makes you jump through the hoops and at the edge of a nasty dead-end crash if you use stand alone DOS, the chess programmers should spare their customers the hassle and migrate. No need to fight or protest Microsoft's stupidity/malice over your customers back. Even if you opt for DOS Box instead of stand alone DOS, thus taking the performance hit, the DOS based GUI and mouse handling is terrible (by todays GUI standards), especially on laptops (i.e. on the LCD screens).
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