2011-07-04 21:18:18

Just as a note we're back on the normal cycle for Windows versions and their lifespans. XP lasted a lot longer than planned because Vista was delayed but for the most part the only wa Microsoft makes its money is when people either upgrade or buy a whole new computer with a new copy of Windows. The stability of XP let things grow a lot which I believe was accidentally beneficial but there is no incentive for Microsoft to stick with the same version of Windows for more than 3 or so years.

As to game menus I honestly believe it depends on the controller system. The Wii's pointing system is relatively easy for sighted users so that's likely to stay, but controlling a mouse-style pointer with an analogue stick is never going to be very efficient. Unless something is as fast, accurate and easy as a Wii remote's pointing or a mouse it's generally best to stick with the basic arrow method, but given the equal inaccessibility of things like Kinect it is a concern that more and more games may rely on motion based controls. The next generation of consoles, if they include these as standard, will just make things worse and worse. Sadly I don't see the mainstream companies listening in the slightest, even if it was as simple as allowing arrow navigation in menus and not making menus loop so we can actually get into the game to begin with.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2011-07-05 12:17:59

On the topic of games, I had an interesting experience yesterday.
I just got back from a lengthy roadtrip, and my younger cousins brought a PS2. There was apparently a problem with the video connection, though, and only the audio wound up working.
And to top it off, the game they tried to do despite this had its voice settings to Japanese. Fortunately most of the menus are voiced, and I understood enough Japanese to put it back into English... but the very first prompt (continue from save / start new game) isn't voiced... fortunately we figured that out eventually.

... Microsoft apparently wanted to patent the ribbon at one point.
Maybe some day I'll saudder the motherboard back together on my XP laptop. Then try to get my 98 machine working again. I still have some notes for a game on there that I wasn't able to copy before the thing stopped booting...

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-05 13:12:25

Cx2 your right about microsoft, though I do find myself wondering, especially with all the hatred of windows vista and the dislike of the 7 interface if the markit base has simply changed.

Then again, I was using windows 95 right up until about the year 2001 sinse I borrowed the old laptop I'd done my A-levels on and took it to uni while my new xp machine was put together and all the grants came through, so probably I have a different opinion on the working life of an os, ie, how long you have to wait before it's completely incompatible and your forced to upgrade.

As to games, whether low vision or not I'm stil of the opinion that the console end of things is pretty much a dead end for access.

Most developement is done either by big faceless corperations who either do not care, or even if they did are too hard to actually say get anything developed. Pluss, with the money involved, access is simply not prophitable.

if screen readers and better console access had been around in the 80's, when even companies like nintendo were stil relatively small and it was possible for one game to stil be made by perhaps only two or three people (mega man 2 was made by three nintendo the developers in their spare time), something might have been done, but right now it'd be like asking warner brothers or disney to include audio descripting in their films by default.

Some sort of third party solution like the one Jyro mentioned may be possible, as in fact happened with audio description, but failing this I see mainstream access really as quite unlikely.

Indi game access though, is however quite another matter entirely.

Speaking of which, great to here work on the tactile display continues. As I said I believe it has the potential to completely change the way we think about computer access and games, and would make many titles accessible which currently aren't, eg, ascii text adventures.

Any news on getting support for braille output by various screen readers? sinse as I said, if it also worked as a braille display it would mean not just general shape, but actual text could be read, ---- for instance labled objects on a general field, or even menues.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-05 14:16:08

I never said 3 years is how long I expect an operating system to last, only that it is how long Microsoft plan on waiting between new OS releases. There are always people who skip versions and always will be. Given how long we were with XP for though I can definitely see people in the mainstream market getting increasingly fed up with this, stability is a good thing generally. I don't mean stability in terms of fewer crashes but stability in the design of the interface here just as a note.

Part of me hopes we might see indy developers return to a greater degree given the ability to easily distribute games through the internet and online services like Wii Ware or the XBox and Playstation online networks. Those still aren't particularly accessible sadly but we can hope.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2011-07-05 17:13:09

As I said, it's wii ware that I'm missing on the wii, but access isn't possible as you said.

it's indi developement for pc, Iphone, mac and accessible platforms that I think will be the major force.

Afterall, at the moment even if someone did! make an entirely accessible game for lets say ps online network, how are people going to even get to play it when the os of the console is inaccessible anyway?

the indi developement environments for other platforms are really an attempt by console devs to corner the already varstly growing computer markit in indi games, but from what I know about indi developement I'm not sure it's been that successful, particularly when companies like nintendo charge for their developement kits, where as an indi pc developer can just work on the game with their own skills, or with some of the free tools available like darkbasic.

I think nintendo at least have seen this, which is why the Wii hhas a more serious os than some of the other systems like ps, having a web brouser and weather channel for instance to try and do some of the jobs of a pc, but whether this stratogy will bare fruite I'm not sure.

As to Os versions, to be honest I was always confused as to why microsoft released so many sub versions of windows like 2000, me, and indeed vista, which always seem to end up being hugely unpopular and unstable in betwene the more major versions, but I suppose it's just greed again.

hopefully though at the least the view options will be something they considder given how mucyh hatred there is towards the flashy windows 7 interface and ribbons.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-06 03:03:53

2000 was not a subversion. It was released more or less alongside 98 as the business/corporate edition, much as NT4 was with 95. It was pretty much an entirely different operating system in a lot of ways, XP just combined the consumer features of 98 such as more support for media types with the gubbins of 2000. Earlier versions of 2000 apparently had very little support for playing video and audio media, and almost no support for games at all. MS brought the two together presumably because they were fed up of having two entirely different OS packages to maintain, though they still do keep a seperate server line which is odd. It used to be that you had for example Windows 2000 server edition with machines running the basic version of 2000 as clients, or that was the original plan anyway.

Vista wasn't a subversion, it was just very poorly planned. They'd been working on it for some time, it was being delayed for some technical reasons or other which is why XP was around for so long. They were trying to rip out all the old stuff that wasn't necessary any more, unfortunately they botched the backward compatibility. XP had only been planned to last the usual 3 or 4 years, Vista just got held up that much longer with Microsoft unable to do much about it.

ME I'll grant was a sort of half baked effort to upgrade 98. It had some interesting points but just wasn't very stable. Whether it was a quick cash grab or an effort to fill in between 98 and XP I couldn't say.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2011-07-06 13:12:29

Does windows 7 have the same issues as vista as far as backwards compatibility goes? I haven't had much exposure to windows 7 to really have much of an oppinion just curious if it has a lot of the same issues as vista.

2011-07-06 13:51:49

General rule of thumb since Vista seems to be that Microsoft has divorced backward compatibility.

Oddly, I mentioned this once while overhearing a group of nerds talking about backward compatibility, and they're like, "Dude, are you crazy? Microsoft is great with backward compatibility!"
I still have no idea where they got that consensus from.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-06 17:52:43

From what I gather 7 is better than Vista for backward compatibility.

This is nothing new. Back when Windows 95 came out I was fully sighted and played mainstream games, lo and behold more than 90% of the games at the time just flat out wouldn't work with 95 or else required massive amounts of effort and huge work arounds. There was a DOS mode you could restart in but it had no CD drivers, you mouse driver and in many cases no sound drivers.

Moving onward to when XP came out about three quarters of mainstream games stopped working, they just couldn't run under XP at all when they were fine under 98.

From time to time this happens, even mainstream gamers suffer from it.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2011-07-07 00:25:17

Hence dosbox and similar.

Interestingly enough, being a huge fan of the amigar graphical game turrican, I bought the pc version in about 1997, but sinse it was a dos game my brother just couldn't! install it correctly on a windows 98 machine.

yet, someone has now created a preconfigured install of dosbox to run the game, so I just downloaded it from the turrican site and can run it just like a windows program.

i have a similar thing for the pc version of prince of persia dn prince of persia Ii.

Getting back to windows 7 though, it does seem that though there are compatibility problems, in 7 they are more fixable with the correct direct x components or vb 6 bits installed for the majority of xp games, where as this isn't true on vista.

heck, some developers are stil working in vb6 with direct x just because they like to, and yet have got relativly easy compatibility fixes for 7. Look at Jim kitchin as an example.

thus, at least I won't have to worry too much if I buy a 7 machine.

thanks for the infor on other windows versions, it did always strike me when reading stuff up that 200 and me were not too useful.

that's actually an advantage with what I did both with switching from 98 to xp, and next when i have to switch from windows xp to 7.

the longer you wait, the less likely you'll be to be foisted with something relatively experimental and not fully worked out like vista or me.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-07 20:38:32

Well back in the day there was no DosBox so many gamers were royally screwed. The change from 98 to XP equally meant lots of gamers were royally screwed, I doubt a virtual machine would have been efficient enough to let you run late 90's games under windows 98 inside a VM on an early XP machine somehow.

Long story short, every so often software on MS operating systems in general and games especially get royally screwed. By my reckoning that's about every second or third version but we can't really determine an accurate trend from so few examples.

So ultimately I'm expecting 8 to have even more compatibility issues, even if we just stick with a 32-bit Intel version and keep things nice and simple.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2011-07-08 13:25:21

As I said, I'm a litle surprise their even thinking about 8 right now, being as 7 hasn't completely got fixed, but that's microsoft andtheir greed I suppose.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-08 16:32:30

Well like I said 3 to 4 years is the normal period for bringing out a new version of windows. No version of windows has existed that hasn't included one mess or another, at least not since 95 came out. If they could they would release a windows 9 3 years after 8 came out with everything fixed and market it as a brand new version, with some cosmetic changes and new interface rubbish to cover over how little new there actually was.

That doesn't feel like being cynical to me so much as how the bosses really feel. It takes time for people to fix stuff so they should be paid for fixing stuff, never mind that they should have got it right in most cases to begin with.

It's the biggest wonder they didn't try pulling a "Slurm Classic" after everybody hated Vista.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2011-07-10 16:12:47

Just to go back to something we mentioned earlier in the topic, according to Che martin who I was playing cards with the other day (and who for obvious reasons I assume to know what he's talking about), you can actually stil group shortcuts and reorganize the the start menue of windows 7 as you want, though he admitted the windows explorer function in windows 7 was irritating, ----- but that's one thing Classic shell could hopefully fix.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-10 16:27:55

Assuming classic shell was accessible. I'm not using 7 so I can't test it but it is possible classic shell may not be accessible, it as far as I know only tries to imitate the way the original menus appear to work as far as sighted users are concerned. Fingers crossed that it is though.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2011-07-10 20:02:40

That's true, though sinse I believe I was told about it by someone on the audeasy list when i raised my concern about windows 7's interface I'd hope it is.

There won't be a way of knowing until i change machines though.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-14 17:04:37

As a warning someone I know who is a long term Hal user had to get a new machine, the same person who had to explain to previously mentioned establishment that screen readers require a sound card. In any event she took advantage of an upgrade offer from Dolphin to move up her version of Hal so that it could actually run on windows 7, good timing you might think but she has had to actually remove Hal and use NVDA because Hal kept continually crashing the machine. I can't confirm whether Hal has general issues with 7 or whether this is machine specific but do tread with caution, if you know someone with 7 who will let you install a demo of Hal on it first that might be wise.

Of course by the time you upgrade 8 might be out instead.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.