windows 8

[Yenome]

So now that MS has released the consumer preview i was wondering if anyone else was gonna see how well mame runs in windows 8. ive had the developer preview downloaded but only played with it once or twice and never ran mame on it. Im gonna put it in my mame rig and see how it all goes. run some bench marks. Any games people want the score from let me know copying my set to my HDD now. My mame rig is a dual core. but i got all the files on my main system which is a quad core so i could try it on both and see how it runs.

[Eddie_Brock]

Speaking purely from personal opinion, what I've seen of W8 makes me want to 
I'll never be using it on my main computer. 

That being said, it could be a cool interface for a Juke or Emu.

[headkaze]

You will still have access to the same old Windows 7 interface in Windows 8.

[Howard_Casto]

HK:  just ignore him, everybody has that reaction when a new windows os is about to be released. 

When Xp screenshots were shown everybody hated it because it looked toy-like.  Once they got it, however, they realized you could switch to the silver theme in like two seconds.  When Vista came out everbody said the "glass" effect was too showy and/or ripped off other oses.  Now I know people that won't run xp because it looks too dated. 

People don't hate new versions of windows, they just hate change. 


That being said, I've learned over the years that it's rather pointless to try out windows betas.  Nothing ever works right, if the kernel has changed then half of your devices won't have drivers and there isn't any win ___ specific software to try out on it anyway.  All it really does is give you a bad impression of a product that most likely will be much better when released.  It isn't even good for future-proofing your apps either.  You'll try them and they won't work and it'll freak you out and you'll try to re-code to get things working again.  Then the official version is released and whatever kept them from working is fixed and you realize that you just wasted all that effort.

There isn't any point in trying out MAME in win 8.  Best case it'll run as good as it does in win 7, worst case it won't, which is irrelevant because anything that makes it run poorly will be addressed by the mame devs once win 8 is officially released.

[Yenome]

got it installed last night with only the video and audio having a problem video i expected as windows told me i would have to reinstall it. ati has windows 8 drivers already heh. and audio there is a work around but havnt tried it. tho after running a -bench 90 on blitz i did see an increase over windows 7. since im not hardly touching my main pc atm i didnt mind putting 8 on it even if i have to redo the entire thing later for 7 again. im just bored.

[Vigo]

Most every other Windows revision is skippable. I doubt 8 will be an exception.

[Howard_Casto]

Most every other Windows revision is skippable. I doubt 8 will be an exception.

So yoru running win 3.11 then?  I'd like to see that rig. 

[Vigo]

I'm mostly saying that half of the windows versions released are not beneficial enough to justify the upgrade. They either don't add enough incentive-wise, or it is a piss poor release and you need to wait for the next revision to make the jump. Vista, ME, 2000, 98 were skippable IMO. 95, 98SE, XP and 7 were the ones more worth the jump.

[Howard_Casto]

I can't really agree with that. 

I'll gladly admit that Me! was a stinker, but that was the LAST revision of 9x, not the first.  2000 was meant for businesses, not the consumer and it worked brilliantly for that.  As a matter of fact you'll find zero businesses running xp but even in this day and age a few still run 2000 based systems.  98 was just fine... the only difference between 98 and 98se were a few upgrade packs, which added support for devices that just weren't out when 98 was originally released.  I'm not saying that 98 is just as good as se, it isn't... but they are both better than 95. Regardless, this example doesn't hold anymore because service packs have replaced minor revisions of the same os and they are free. Vista is a perfectly acceptable OS, we hated it back then because it was so drastically different than xp, which we had been running for quite some time and it was so brand spanking new that half of our devices didn't work (had the exact same issue with xp).  Looking back it isn't THAT bad.  I still prefer win 7, but a new version of windows was desperately needed at the time. 

So out of your examples, only two were really a waste of time (Me! and arguably Vista). 

I totally agree with you that being an early adopter doesn't make any sense.  I won't buy an OS anymore until it's been out for a couple of months and the reported problems are at a minimum.  Skipping an entire revision isn't a given though.... that's a bit drastic.

[Vigo]

Out of all the Windows systems I consider skippable, Windows 2000 is the best. It didn't offer much for interface improvements, and SE was good enough for me at the time, so I didn't adopt it right away. XP came out very shortly afterwards 2000, so there was no real point to do so. I was under the impression that XP professional was just as popular for businesses, although 2000 Server edition had a following. My company only upgraded from XP to 7 last year, and I think those companies that remained with 2000 only did so because XP didn't offer enough incentive for the business edition to make the upgrade. On a personal level, XP felt much more complete of an OS.

98 had some of the most disastrous sinkholes I have ever seen in an operating system. I swear it must have single-handedly made a huge business out of virus protection software. 98SE at least repaired the worst of the security loopholes. 98 was just a horribly exploitable OS even if it was the standard bear of the time. I do not miss those days in the least.

Vista had an almost draconian security policy where you would have to give approval to just about any file being opened or application started. It made the system almost unusable and the problem could not be entirely worked around even after changing settings. I was so bad I abandoned it after a few months of use. Perhaps they did correct that problem after I gave up, but I already got wind of windows 7 by the time I went to look into if it got resolved.

[wp34]

I'm quite happy with Windows 7 but this is the first Windows upgrade I've been excited about in a while.  I've been a Windows Tablet user for years.  The iPad has shown me just how limited my Tablet is but it is still too limiting for me to be able to give up my Tablet.  This OS looks like it is designed to be very usable with a touch-screen---something Windows 7 really is not.  I'm hopeful it will give me the convenience of a Tablet with the full features of a laptop when I need them.

[Gray_Area]

I loved XP when it came out. Didn't take long to figure out, was less clunky and WAY cooler looking than 98.

Stock Vista was cool if you're into black, but the arrangement looked like they made it with Political Correctness in mind. Half of things had fancy ambiguous titles, and were in weird places. There were some neat new features, if you knew how to find them.

I haven't tried 7, though am thinking of putting that on my main system.

[wizkid32]

I'm mostly saying that half of the windows versions released are not beneficial enough to justify the upgrade. They either don't add enough incentive-wise, or it is a piss poor release and you need to wait for the next revision to make the jump. Vista, ME, 2000, 98 were skippable IMO. 95, 98SE, XP and 7 were the ones more worth the jump.

I'd have to say I agree.  With the exception of Win. 98.    Running that on my cab...

I really don't see what Win. 8 has to do with our hobby.  IMHO, I would not choose to put it in a cab.  I would choose either 98 or XP.  98 will play DOS and 95 games flawlessly, and XP is a modern OS (w/ good compatibility for modern titles) with much lower system requirements than 7/8.  I just don't see myself using the "features" of Win. 8 on an arcade machine. 

Not saying that someone else wouldn't want it on their machine, but I don't.  Unless I'm missing something about 8?

[Yenome]

yea after playing with it for a day or two it seems more at home to a touchscreen system. when it boots up first you have to login with your live info then you get an interface like the windows phone. I put windows 7 back on my main system and have it on my cab so now i just need to finish updating all the roms.

[Haze]

2000 was meant for businesses, not the consumer and it worked brilliantly for that.  As a matter of fact you'll find zero businesses running xp but even in this day and age a few still run 2000 based systems.  

Most seem to run XP?  I've seen a couple who were fooled into running Vista (well they purchased the machines and had little choice) but I see very few on 2000/7 these days.

Although personally I think 2000 was the last *good* OS they released, and it's been downhill from there, slick, powerful, well organized, stable, intuitive with no gimmicks.

W8 is a joke, Metro might be acceptable if it was a frontend you could launch for some specific apps, but putting it as the default interface (when as an OS interface it's useless) with what should be the primary desktop 'bolted on' and stripped of a fair bit of it's power and key functions (start menu) just feels wrong.

People tend to hate change because most change is not for the better, it's often to sell new versions or because people also assume things which aren't changing are dead, also a fair amount of the change is politically motivated, try to get everybody to buy apps through a Microsoft store, use patented interface designs so nobody can copy them in an attempt to provide a familiar interface elsewhere (software lock-in) or to make extra money by showing you more ads (the 360 dashboard based on the same tech..)

None of the interface changes in Win 8 make it a better OS, they just make it more inconvenient when you want to do power tasks, metro apps are full-screen only?  I spend most of my time on the PC with multiple windows open, sized how i want them, so I can monitor stuff and Microsoft are saying the future is full-screen apps?  That's... madness, it's almost like being back on DOS.

It's scary to think they probably actually want to drop the desktop completely (why else would they have shunned it into a corner and ripped out key parts?)

People just end up accepting change, because eventually they're left with no real choice in the matter, both hardware and software support for legacy systems vanishes, or in the case of online applications, the old versions simply don't exist anymore.

[HaRuMaN]

I work for a massive company, and we're all on XP.  We're making the switch to 7 only on the next refresh (so when your 3 yr PC lease is up, your new one will have 7).

[Drnick]

Our 700 machines at my place are all XP with the exception of a few very new laptops. We did have a lot of 2000 machines but they all got replaced about 5 Years ago.   The only reason we are now looking into upgrading to windows 7 is because Microsoft officially end support for xp shortly.   

Talking of Windows 7, I went on a troubleshooting course for windows 7 recently and the best thing that I learned,  If you want to get the Menubar up (File Tools Options etc) you can do it by holding down the Alt key for a few seconds. Man it always bugged me that they had taken that bar away and you had to mess about to get it to show.

As for Operating systems that were good.  Throughout the various PC's I have had over the years these are the versions of OS that I have utilised

Dos 6.1
Windows 3.11 WFWG
Windows 95
Windows 98SE
Windows XP (And only went with that when newer hardware required it)
Windows 7

I would consider every other OS that Microsoft have released to be a waste of time unless being used for business.

[ahofle]

98 had some of the most disastrous sinkholes I have ever seen in an operating system. I swear it must have single-handedly made a huge business out of virus protection software. 98SE at least repaired the worst of the security loopholes. 98 was just a horribly exploitable OS even if it was the standard bear of the time. I do not miss those days in the least.

Hehe  http://epiclogon.ytmnd.com/

[lilshawn]

I beta tested longhorn (vista) and blackcomb,(7)...missed out on 8 though 

they stared out good with some great revamps with blackcomb (to become 7) but it was put on hold. they realized that revamping the OS was going to take alot longer than they realized and sort of back burnered it. They decided to do a ---meecrob--- on XP and release it as an interim OS until they could revamp blackcomb.

so in the mean time they would basically strip back xp and windows server 2003 software mix it together and start from there...vista was born. vista started out okay. in early revisions they tried to keep the image size down so it would fit onto a CD, they didn't want the extra expense of DVD media and people complaining about only having a cd reader etc etc etc. then they added some stuff they had coded for 7 and it pushed them over the edge. so they figured.. well we got 4gb of space now, lets fill it up with crap. Thats when vista went downhill. it became bloated with crap and showy stuff that they had planned for 7 and had lost sight of the root of the operating system. they got more interested in showy stuff than ensuring the OS worked right. they put it on hold for a bit while they went and worked on blackcomb for a while, all the while still trying to patch XP and Vista to try and work properly. ugh.

With the fiaso of vista fresh in their heads they set to work full time on blackcomb. focus was improving performance, as vista, with it's bloated sparkle and nausiating amount of features they crammed into it, the OS ran slow as old people fornicate. by the time windows 7 started to go public allot of features had been improved greatly. speed was way up. even startup and shutdown times where reduced.

i have to say given MS record of every other OS i'd avoid 8 simply because they are trying new stuff much as they did with vista and i'm not terribly confident with my experiences with vista

[Drnick]

I would second the above.  To me Windows 8 looks like it will be nice on a mobile device/tablet, but as a home OS its probably gonna suck it big time. 

[HaRuMaN]

I would second the above.  To me Windows 8 looks like it will be nice on a mobile device/tablet, but as a home OS its probably gonna suck it big time. 

I was under the impression that it is going to be switchable on the fly.  Mobile / tablet style, or windows style like we're used to.

[lilshawn]

the more i look at it the more it resembles a tablet OS.

not that i have anything against them, but tablets are a very nice market and MS thought it would blow up and be huge. now that it has subsided MS was stuck with this OS they put all this work into and just decided to sick it on desktops.

how many people do you know have a touch interface computer. probably not many. I have one and i dont use it. i find my need for a huge desktop area with tiny icons + big sausage fingers = not being able to hit anything.

i suppose the win8 would drastically improve this with these giant tiles they use but i'm not convinced quite yet.

[Haze]

I would second the above.  To me Windows 8 looks like it will be nice on a mobile device/tablet, but as a home OS its probably gonna suck it big time.  

I was under the impression that it is going to be switchable on the fly.  Mobile / tablet style, or windows style like we're used to.

you can launch a 'desktop' application which resembles what you have now, sans start menu.  If you want to start / find a program it's right back to the ugly-as-hell fullscreen tiles touchscreen / tablet interface you go.  Start menu is *gone*

you can (thankfully) still pin stuff / put it on the desktop, for now.. but it's still a major inconvenience, and absolutely backwards system

it *is* a tablet / phone OS, with the desktop becoming secondary...

[Savannan]

I installed win 8 last week on my laptop.  I really dont like it.  my biggest complaint was there is no "start" button..perhaps I was missing something...I dunno..can you totally disable the metro ui and have a start button?

from what ive read on other sites, Ms started to work on win 8...they had some fresh ideas but there wasnt a real selling point to it.  they decided incorporated the metro ui as found on there mobile OS to connect everyone socially...what a fantastic option so they think...(to be declared)

As far as the other users on here say...every other OS is crap...Im starting to think so also.  ever odd numbered OS has been pretty good.

anyways, i think i'll stick with the trusty win 7.





   

[Dawgz Rule]

XP is extremely popular in the business world.  Most didn't go to Vista because the hardware requirements were so steep. 

[Savannan]

/cry ...i guess i answered my own question...

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/microsoft_pulls_disappearing_act_start_button_windows_8_preview

[Howard_Casto]

If the start button is still there functionality-wise, you've got to wonder why they've eliminated the button.  I mean you can't use the extra space at the hover/swipe point so what is the point of making it insivible? To save 16 pixels of space?

I thought the win 7 start orb was pretty good... it takes up less space than the xp/9x one and yet it's still noticable enough that people should have enough sense to click it. I've gotta admit though... this won't effect me at all.  I just use the windows key on my keyboard. 

[MacGyver]

It was one guy, he is the reason for everything Vista and after.  He is the reason the "sub-menu arrow or plus icon" disappears when you move your mouse over to the right-side of the file explorer pane.  He is the reason that you can no longer open a search window by right clicking a folder.  He is the reason you cannot get the status of your network (IP and whatnot) by right clicking of the networking icon in the tray.  He is also the reason the networking icon in the tray looks like a trident in front of a monitor instead of a network activity icon (you know one that would let you know that your machine is sending packets out when your browser was closed, letting you potentially know that you have a virus).  He is the one responsible for removing our ability to have a "second shell" running, thereby causing us to log in completely as an administrator to launch a administrator credentialed explorer.  He's the one that gave us the cluster-f$#k that is UAC, and split Windows into 1 proper version and 4 crippled-ware ones.  He's why we can't get rid of "Favorites" list from the file explorer.  He is the reason search doesn't really search inside files Microsoft thinks are too scary for grandma to look in (XML, INF, NFO, INI, EXE).  He is the reason the start-menu was broken, and why you now have to "search" for things in it.  He is the dumb-ass that forgets that some people actually "use" computers to make all that fancy touchscreen-ready crap.  He is the reason that when you deploy to Iraq for a year without internet, that you can't "activate" your windows, thereby giving you a hassle.  He is the reason they took out Hyper-terminal.  He is the reason that millions of office employees were required to re-learn the Office interface.  I'm pretty sure he is the reason that the Titanic hit that iceberg. 
His name is Steve Kaneko, and if I had a sh#t list he'd be on it.     I'd switch to Linux before I run Windows 8 on anything I own.  Hell I spend 4 hours remastering XP and tracking down various drivers that work on XP to downgrade my Sony Vaio laptops from Windows Vista and 7.  Anyone that works with files knows what I'm taking about, and why anything after XP is crap.

[Dawgz Rule]

Love XP and still running it on everything at home. 

[Haze]

Anyone that works with files knows what I'm taking about, and why anything after XP is crap.

Yep, I shouldn't be having to use a 3rd party piece of software on Windows (Total Commander) just to feel I have a file management system which doesn't suck, and actually works, and works quickly, doing what I ask of it.

These are the most basic fundamental things an OS should be doing.  File Management, Seamless access to different types of file systems, Window Management..  The first has been going downhill since 2000 (where search actually WORKED out the box)  The second Microsoft won't do, probably because they like abusing their FAT patents on pluggable devices, and Metro even royally stuffs up the last one on an operating system called 'Windows' .....  

I've always been a Windows user since moving from the Amiga side of things, but the rot is getting stupid, important features are being relegated to the trash heap and simply don't work as well as they used to despite us having far better machines.  The problem is Windows can't fail because no PC manufacturer will bundle anything but Windows for the mainstream, and Microsoft won't offer licenses for older versions after a certain point.  Even the versions which are considered steaming piles of poop can't be considered failures, because they all reached significant user levels due to the bundling.

With more and more computer illiterate people using computers people who actually want to use them properly are now well into the minority, so views such as the ones being expressed on tech sites over these changes will simply fall on deaf ears.

[Dawgz Rule]

Amiga.....now that was a great computer.  I had a 500, 2000, and 3000.   From a desktop productivity point of view, it ran circles around anything else.  It was also a great gaming computer.  I moved to an IBM when the game Syndicate came out and the PC version was significantly better.  Falcon was one of my favorites and I recall the early "LAN party" days where we would lash two of these together with a null modem cable and duke it out. 

[lilshawn]

His name is Steve Kaneko, and if I had a sh#t list he'd be on it.

*pulls list of people to kill out of wallet*

Steve.....Kan...eko...

*folds paper neatly and places it back in wallet*

[Howard_Casto]

I think that windows was influcenced by peer pressure.  Everybody complained back in the day that windows should be more like Mac OS.  The problem is what made windows great is that it wasn't like Mac OS at all.  It was exposed and raw, a power user didn't have to flip a billion switches to get full functionality.  And unlike linux, there was a little bit of user-friendlyness to go with it as well.

I enjoy the visual upgrades and Some of the user-friendly setup wizards and helpers are really great.  The fact that the desktop takes advantage of hw acceleration is a much needed upgrade as well, but I liked the file system and windows innards the way they were back in xp.  



That being said:

These complaints about poor searching and such are annoyances to be sure, but minor ones at best because with a little bit of tweaking, things can be set back the way there were.

[Haze]

These complaints about poor searching and such are annoyances to be sure, but minor ones at best because with a little bit of tweaking, things can be set back the way there were.

They really can't.  Even if you 'tweak' Vista / Win 7 they consistently fail to find content within files, and take hours doing so.  The search system is so dumb if you have deep searching enabled it becomes utterly useless for fnding by filename it's just .. a disaster, and considering how much they've pushed the feature, and to what degree it used system resources on Vista to index stuff it's unbelivably bad.

You could tweak XP to act like 2000, which was the only saving grace of the search system there, but with 7 it's simply awful.  I have no choice but to use a 3rd party file manager for my needs.

I think some heads need banging at Microsoft over the role an OS plays.  You shouldn't need to know it's there, but at the same time it should always be there and available for doing power operations, once it starts getting in the way of what you're doing, slowing you down and being an incovenience while failing to provide a high quality basic operating system functionaltiy it's a joke.  No excuse for things like notepad being so bad with large files either for instance, handling of text files, even large ones is surely a 'basic OS function'.  Afaik there isn't even basic functionality for manually grouping fonts, sub-foldering them, each application has to do it manually..  apart from a bit of gloss that functionality hasn't changed from 9x, yet has always been lacking while at the same time they rewrite the bundled games instead...  it reminds me of MAME development tbh, but unlke MAME Windows is a commercial product costing people millions each year.


You can pick hundreds and thousands of holes in basic Windows functionality, things it should be doing, but isn't, yet instead they're deciding to force a brand new UI and pointless changes to toolbars (changing them to ribbons) down peoples throats, which add nothing to improve functionality, nothing to improve productivity, and in many sense are a leap backwards.

[MacGyver]

"Search" works so badly in Win 7 and Vista that I resort to using "dir /s filename.*" most of the time.  If you have to use tools from the far past to do something today, then I contend that they are not only going backwards, but sideways too.

For those of you whose companies still use XP, watch out, if you're the Sysadmin you are going to have issues with Vista and Win7.  Basically if you use "SeparateProcess" for running explore.exe or iexplore.exe, be prepared to be upset, you will now have to run your machine logged in as an Admin, or have a second machine up and running as Admin, either way you're not launching explorer.exe as an Admin anymore from your user account.    That is by no mean the only issue/change (if only) but I felt it illustrated the level of change well.

[headkaze]

You could tweak XP to act like 2000, which was the only saving grace of the search system there, but with 7 it's simply awful.  I have no choice but to use a 3rd party file manager for my needs.

I hate the new search feature too. It reminds me of the search system in OSX although much worse. For XP I have a couple registry mods that makes it perfect and I find myself going back to my XP machine to perform searches now. I'm curious what 3rd party file manager you use because I've been looking around for one myself.

This is what makes XP's search system perfect...

Turn off search assistant.

Code: [Select]

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CabinetState]
"Use Search Asst"="no"
Search all files.

Code: [Select]

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex]
"FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions"=dword:00000001
Also why doesn't Explorer have simple pattern matching for file filtering? Even the Amiga had file managers with this feature.

[Haze]

I'm curious what 3rd party file manager you use because I've been looking around for one myself.

I'm using Total Commander for my search needs, inferface is a bit clunky, but functionality trumps interface every time.  Microsoft seems to think in reverse.

[lilshawn]

i use "everything" for my searching. it's a stupid interface, but it works and once it's index is built, its super fast.

http://www.voidtools.com/

[Haze]

i use "everything" for my searching. it's a stupid interface, but it works and once it's index is built, its super fast.

http://www.voidtools.com/

I've seen various people plug this, but I fail to see what it offers over the Vista Indexing, it looks to be practically the same thing, maybe a slightly less resource hoggy implementation. 

from their very own FAQ

1.3 Does Everything search file contents?
No, "Everything" does not search file contents, only file and folder names.

99% of the time if I'm searching (be it for a part number, string etc.) I want to be searching in the files, point it at a MAME tree and find things.  The Windows search is *hopeless* for this post 2000 / XP configured to act like 2000, and 'Everything' doesn't add anything to that.  Total Commander on the other hand deep searches the entire tree in seconds.

[Howard_Casto]

Ahh... so THAT's  what you are complaining about. 

Myself I always have a general idea of which file in the mame source I need to look through... I just open it up in my fav editor and do the old ctrl+F. 

It is an annoyance... I miss the feature, but I consider it to be a very minor one.  Afterall the only unmanaged program with a ton of source files that I ever edit without a gui is MAME. 

[drventure]

Agent Ransack (the free version) is my goto tool for doing deep searches. It integrates with Explorer, has a decent interface, and is very fast (even spools up multiple threads if you have a multi core machine).

Plus, it can use regex's or normal search expressions, and can show context in the results pane.

It's not an indexed search app (so there's no "indexing" pain), so that means it's typically more useful if you have a folder structure where you can narrow down what to search by starting at a particular folder.

http://www.mythicsoft.com/page.aspx?type=agentransack&page=home

the paid version adds a few bells and whistles but ymmv

And finally, I use a filename only search called Locate32

http://locate32.net

It's also good for what it's intended, but the dev is more or less ceasing development on it.

It is open source though.

[wizkid32]

Love XP and still running it on everything at home. 

+1