If so many people are saying it I'll believe it. I don't think the issue is the machine, though. Design logic here would say it's the application. We're talking about a physical device local to a 64 bit bus that can push out over a hundred meg a second. How big are these backglass images?
It's not just backglass images. Each table usually also has an associated preview video which can range anywhere from 3-25MB in size. A full compliment of tables can easily consist of a 2-3GB of videos and backglass images.
That being said, I think some of it really may just be a matter of faster hardware covering up code/design inefficiencies. This is glaringly evident with the pinball emulators themselves. There is no valid reason it should take the kind of horsepower that people are having to throw at these pin applications to get smooth game play. But for those apps it really just boils down to antiquated engines that have had years of hacks, band-aids, scripts and add-ins tacked on to get all of the functionality that we have today. The problem is it's all woefully inefficient, and the only easy way to overcome those issues is to simply throw more horsepower at the problem.
There are some new projects under way that aim to address these issues, but who knows how long it will take for those to come to fruition.
That's probably a point but I bet the contents/software will outgrow the drive before the drive dies.
Well, it's not like heat or some other factor that would cause gradual degradation. All it takes is one jolt that's just a little too hard to do instantaneous (and often catastrophic) damage.
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Topic: Alchemy: Video Pinball Shmup Table (Read 97890 times)
