Yes, unfortunately Gothic seems to have that problem and I couldn't find any solution to it right now. Will keep working on it.

If you back your stuff up and commit to source code control frequently it's not really a big issue. The most you'll lose is a half day's work or so, if that.

Besides, I've been running Microsoft Windows Beta's since XP and can't remember one that had any horrendous bugs or glitches. There were some problems with the Vista beta because of the new driver model and the lack of drivers, but besides that nothing much.

Well, I am not posting in OS X or Linux threads because I am not using them, so I obviously cannot tell whether they are awesome or bad. If I wasn't using Windows 8, I wouldn't have been posting in 8-related threads, because I cannot judge first-hand how it performs.

Same as with games, I don't post how this or that point-and-click adventure is the best game ever made, or the worse, because I haven't played it so I cannot judge how it is (related to my posts about Blizzard's games (I've put most of my gaming hours, ever since I started playing games, up until now, in either Blizzard's or Valve's games... I practically grew up playing Warcraft 1, Starcraft, Half-Life, Counter Strike, and Warcraft 3 (you don't see any Diablo there because I didn't play it at the time, currently playing my second playthrough of Diablo 2).
Most of my stuff is stored on a second internal HDD (and my girl's external HDD that I use for backing up my stuff every once in a while), so even if the OS crashes and the main HDD dies, I can continue what I was doing before just by installing an OS to the second HDD.

Besides, I've only seen some graphical glitches in IE10 and Control Panel, and Diablo 2 giving me black screen (but fixed that easily by virtualizing XP and installing it there... and thanks to VirtualBox's snapshots, the game starts in just a few seconds, and I can actually trick the game into thinking that I am always on the current game / save, even if I die I won't be loosing anything but just a bit of progress).

Besides x2, now I have a 'perfectly legal' OS, let's just say my Windows 7 installation wasn't that 'legal'. Got it from the uni, but still, it was for uni's domain only.

Probably because of the change in Aero, Firefox is having some graphical issues too when its run maximized. Have your tried, ALT+Enter?

Or maybe there's a hardware acceleration or similar setting in-game that you can disable (some folks at Neowin report that disabling HA fixes some of the graphical issues for Firefox)?

Unfortunately these games don't have a software mode and don't support switching to windowed mode while running (it has to be set ahead of time in the INI).

The other GOGs I've tried don't have this problem so hopefully this isn't too widespread.

You've probably never used Linux before. (There are several preloading daemons/init systems which do just that.)

There is a massive difference between cached memory and memory that is currently in use. Under Linux your cache is typically always full (yes, full, which is more than Windows). As I write my, 4GB system is currently caching roughly 3.5GB with 500mb in use.

As for the argument against performance, sure. As long as you never need to use a swap (or page file), you shouldn't see much difference, however, if I have an OS eating half my memory alone and another process happens to need quite a large chunk of that, I'll start to run into fairly major slowdown.

But yeah, sorry to drill this in, but "cached" is very different from "In use". (not to mention things like shared/virtual memory)

Edit: Haha, you reminded me of a website which is solely dedicated to explaining why under Linux RAM usage is almost always full (unused RAM is wasted): http://www.linuxatemyram.com/

CHEATER! And I want that too...

I am currently stuck to grinding to get my level 31 barbarian more powerful to go ahead with Diablo himself (end of Act 4), also trying to create as many Full Rejuvenation potions as possible (now I have 6, target is 16).

I'm hoping to make the Prismatic Amulet with the Horadric Cube (1 perfect gem of each type + 1 amulet needed) to get some serious elemental defence against Diablo, but it is proceeding too slowly because gems seem to be so hard to come by, even with some "increase chances of finding magic items" charms or whatever, at least in Act 4.

At some point I had lots of all kinds of chipped and flawed gems, but stupidly I sold most of them away because I didn't know I could make better gems out of them with the Cube.


Sorry offtopic, I am not using Win8 for now even though I shortly tried the preview on VMWare Player. Too bad to hear there may be some Win8 backwards compatibility issues, I thought I read a rumor that "everything that runs on Win7, runs just the same (if not better) on Win8", but maybe that is not the full truth then. I guess my next PC will still have Win7, I was thinking whether I should wait for Win8.

From what I gather, that statement is probably true for almost all applications that "normal" users run on their machines. However, Microsoft's marketing department will _not_ have tested games that were meant to run on Windows 95, and tweaked to work on WIndows 7, before making such a statement. That's something that our niche community will have to find out by itself. :)

I guess I was kinda hoping the innards of Win8 would be so identical to Win7 that there would be good reason for this to be true (ie. Win8 = Win7 + optional Metro UI and some new services (like Windows Store and Live stuff)), but apparently it is more than just the UI/cosmetic changes.

Oh well... :( Damn I hope there would be more and more working virtual machines for running older games, Win9x seems to be overlooked at the moment. Maybe I should buy a couple more of old retro PCs for spare parts.

Well, I "have" to cheat, after the terrible Paladin character I made in my first playthrough. Just wanted to experience the story faster, but I guess I failed with that so now I am stuck playing from the beginning (I wasted my respec point in the early phase of the game). Cheating mainly because I don't want to keep the game running constantly, and we all know Diablo 2 doesn't have a quick save feature that when loading will bring me to the same place I saved the game.

Several points in Might and Holy Freeze, and everything else in Holy Fire... Who would have thought that creatures in Hell are very resistant to fire!? Since my main damage was from passive auras, which creatures in Hell were highly resistant to, I kind of bored myself to death farming better gear and experience.

And yea, I didn't know making better gems was possible too, was selling every gem I could find.
Don't waste your money. Since Windows 98 is out of print and long gone now (and will never be coming back), you're 'free' to pirate it, in my view. Then just make a VM with VirtualBox (I've gone away from VMware Player as VB seems a bit 'nicer' and have had less problems with it so far), and you'd be good to go.

Hyper-V on Windows 8 supposedly has improved graphics performance (haven't tested it, my CPU doesn't support SLAT), but it requires SLAT which is available only on the newer Intel and AMD processors.

No need for even that, I still have a legit Win98SE installation CD-ROM. But what I've tried with it with VMWare Player wasn't quite successful (I got it working as it was in Safe Mode or something), but maybe I didn't do everything I was supposed to. But as I googled more info on it, I got the impression 3D accelerated Win9x gaming in at least VMWare is still non-functional.

Maybe there are not enough people requesting that because WinXP does run most Win9x era games just fine. Too bad not all. I'm currently playing e.g. Heavy Gear on a real Win98SE laptop, because I was unable to get the latest patched HG version to work on either WinXP or Win7 (bombs out if you try to load a mission).

I'm still testing the Consumer Preview to see if my initial dislike stands or if I can live with Windows 8. I'm beginning to see how you can make the apps menu into a handy two-click way to open all most-used programs (Windows key+mouse click on program icon). It takes some customizing: 1. delete all crap Microsoft put there, that you don't need. 2. disable the 'Live-tile' feature (right click on relevant apps) if all the live-feed information of apps disturbs you (you can make the App-screen into a row of just buttons instead of all the over-stimulating tiles full of messages and pictures you see in the youtube-previews). 3. pin all your own favorite programs and folders to the start menu. 4. shuffle the icons into groups to your liking, with a feature hidden in the lower right of the screen, you can shuffle whole groups as well.

It's a pity the start menu doesn't allow you to pick your own icons, but what I managed to do is creating separate Baldur's Gate installs, make shortcuts to bgmain in a folder (or plain-old desktop), change icons the old way and pin them to the apps menu: voila, all Baldur's Gate campaigns on the apps menu, each with an own icon.

My final item of news: I managed to get Baldur's Gate running smooth in Windows 8, but unlike Windows 7 (in dual boot) on the same hardware, I had to turn on 3D acceleration in the BGConfig-program.

Another test I will run: none of my video-cards is powerful enough to run the opening cutscene of Heroes VI demo version smoothly, but as I'm writing I'm installing it on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 boots (same laptop) to compare how it looks and which OS performs better in my case.

Heh, here's me trying to actually pass on a bit of knowledge. Perhaps it was the wrong place for me to do so, however, I've realised that I really don't want to waste my time explaining this when Google can probably help you more. At least then you'll get developer mailing lists instead of on some gaming forum.

"In The Beginning Was the Command Line" (Interesting read on the origins of this mess we're in today.)