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What has microsoft got to do with anything. They have helped PC gaming more than any other company in recent years. With the domination of windows and directx (by microsoft) virtually all games should run on all pc's if they are programmed correctly.
I don't know if that really helped. Windows is more hungry in system resources with every release. I can run stuff on my Win95 Pentium II 233 Mhz that someone with a WinXP OS needs 450 Mhz for. You also have to remember that DirectX, while a good tool, slows down the game too. Before an instruction is processed, it has to be translated first. This is why emulators ran on DOS back in the day. It's faster to give direct instructions to the computer parts.
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Do you remember getting games to work back in the dos days? It wasn't pretty. Without microsoft, pc gaming could well have floundered and died after the mid '90's.
I've never had a problem running DOS games. Windows hasn't made it any easier. Look at the Help forum and you'll see loads of problems with running bishoujo games on Windows; most of those being WinXP problems. What innovation (/sarcasm). There have always been driver problems. There have been in DOS, there are in Windows. It's not that much difference.
[/QUOTE]But I still don't get it, what has microsoft got to do with CPU and GPU development (apart from creating the main API for the latter)?[/QUOTE]
While Microsoft doesn't have anything to do with GPU's, it has a deal with Intel, the leading CPU producer. Why do you think each Windows is more hungry? Because Microsoft made it that way, so it would require a stronger CPU, forcing people to buy a newer one, and getting Intel money. Intel 'pays back' Microsoft by making Office work better on Intel chips by involving him with the development.
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and it's not as if people can't choose to buy them if they want. Hell, you can even get some games for them
When I say I hate Microsoft and its Windows, people always ask me what I am using. Windows 95 OSR2, from Microsoft. Then they think they have proven their point. But they have not. -Why- am I using Windows? Because I DON'T HAVE A CHOICE. There's many software out there that will only work on PC, and not on Mac, and not on Linux and other OSes. The only choice I have is Windows because that's the OS which can run the programs I want.
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Yes but Gates, it is said, also stole a lot from Apple in the beginning backstab them as it were
The story goes a bit like this:
IBM needed an OS for its IBM PC. So they contacted a small company, Microsoft, to make an OS for them. Microsoft then bought an OS from another company, altered it, and named it MSDOS. Microsoft delivered the OS to IBM. When looking at it, IBM discovered a load of bugs. They fixed the bugs and then released the OS as PCDOS. Microsoft would continue working on its DOS system.
Some time later, Microsoft took a look at what kind of OS Apple had, and copied it. Windows was born. However, it was not until version 3.1 that it became popular, and evolved to what it is today.
The next Windows released is codenamed Longhorn. Summarized, it will monitor everything you do on your PC, just like IE already does while you surf the web, and send it to Microsoft. They will also make you pay for all the times you use their programs, updates, etc.
I hope it will fail.