Ok, call me boring, but this sounds just too familiar to me.
First of all, you must be aware of the fact, that MS makes their money with their OS and their Office application. And keep in mind, that the OS is the prerequisite for their Office.
It's easy to see, that everything, that might threat their OS must be removed - at almost any cost. The most plain example was Netscape. You could (can) run Netscape on nearly every platform - there was no real need for Windows, you could choose the OS you liked. That's bad for MS, of course! And you all know, how MS defeated Netscape...
Now it's the same with MPEG4 - you can use ist on your PC, Mac, even on your soon to buy handy ( = mobile), your Settop Box, your PVR, and what else. So if MPEG4 becomes the standard - there would be no need to buy an OS from Redmond for these devices. (And good old competition keeps prices reasonable!) But on the other hand, if windows media will be the new standard you are tied to Windows, and that's where they are making their money with. And since they make a big fortune with windows, they don't mind to spend a small fortune just to ensure, that the big money keeps coming.
So keep this in mind, if someone offers you something for free - there is almost everytime a catch.
Ultima uses 320x200 resolution, displaying 256 colours. That's absolutly standard. Any VGA-card can display this resulotion. Even the fastest Radeon or Geforce can do this. But you won't get any utilities for setting your refresh rate in DOS, so you will most probably be stuck to 60 Hz.
... if they don't include support for DirectPlay. There are already a lot of good games for the Mac, but most of them lack network support for mixed win/mac network games.
The latest example: The PTW addon for Civ3. It's not yet decided if there will be a port for the mac, because the main problem is the DirectPlay based network of the windows version.
And since network gaming seems to be the place, the gaming industry is heading, imho there is a need for an free network-api, which is designed for gaming, like directplay. There's OpenGL, OpenML, now who will create OpenNL for OpenNetwerkLibrary ?
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Ok, call me boring, but this sounds just too familiar to me.
First of all, you must be aware of the fact, that MS makes their money with their OS and their Office application. And keep in mind, that the OS is the prerequisite for their Office.
It's easy to see, that everything, that might threat their OS must be removed - at almost any cost. The most plain example was Netscape. You could (can) run Netscape on nearly every platform - there was no real need for Windows, you could choose the OS you liked. That's bad for MS, of course! And you all know, how MS defeated Netscape...
Now it's the same with MPEG4 - you can use ist on your PC, Mac, even on your soon to buy handy ( = mobile), your Settop Box, your PVR, and what else. So if MPEG4 becomes the standard - there would be no need to buy an OS from Redmond for these devices. (And good old competition keeps prices reasonable!)
But on the other hand, if windows media will be the new standard you are tied to Windows, and that's where they are making their money with. And since they make a big fortune with windows, they don't mind to spend a small fortune just to ensure, that the big money keeps coming.
So keep this in mind, if someone offers you something for free - there is almost everytime a catch.
Ultima uses 320x200 resolution, displaying 256 colours. That's absolutly standard. Any VGA-card can display this resulotion. Even the fastest Radeon or Geforce can do this. But you won't get any utilities for setting your refresh rate in DOS, so you will most probably be stuck to 60 Hz.
... if they don't include support for DirectPlay. There are already a lot of good games for the Mac, but most of them lack network support for mixed win/mac network games.
The latest example: The PTW addon for Civ3. It's not yet decided if there will be a port for the mac, because the main problem is the DirectPlay based network of the windows version.
And since network gaming seems to be the place, the gaming industry is heading, imho there is a need for an free network-api, which is designed for gaming, like directplay.
There's OpenGL, OpenML, now who will create OpenNL for OpenNetwerkLibrary ?