A Question For Tom

[DJ Infinity]

Tom,

Is there any chance of Game Ex going 64 bit?

[headkaze]

Tom,

Is there any chance of Game Ex going 64 bit?

.NET applications in general are "compile once run anywhere" which means the byte code produced by a .NET application is compiled on the target machine. Therefore it will compile and run as 64-bit on a 64-bit machine. The problem is Tom has to target GameEx for the x86 platform. The reason for this is because of the components used by GameEx. If he was going to make a 64-bit version he would have to recompile all the dependancies for 64-bit. Another problem is because Tom uses MDX 1.1 it will never run under 64-bit unless he moves to something like SlimDX and compiles that under 64-bit natively. MDX was discontinued by Microsoft and was "born into" XNA. Also GameEx uses DirectDraw which is a depreciated API in DirectX. The sensible way for GameEx to move forward is to go to Direct3D then move to an equivalent Managed Direct3D API like XNA in the future. Anyway it's my opinion that 64-bit is not a great requirement for a Front End, especially a FE that uses video hardware accelleration in the first place. Video cards are getting faster but GameEx will unlikely need to. It's not an emulator so it doesn't need to do many things all the time like Mame does. The only improvement I could see to moving to 64-bit would be in updating lists. But alot of that is dependant on CPU/RAM/HDD speeds also. If Tom writes the update list application and sets it for "Any CPU" he could have that code compiled under 64-bit and launched external to GameEx. But again, I don't see a huge motivation in moving to 64-bit in the near future.

[DJ Infinity]

Thanx as always

[Tom Speirs]

Thanx as always

HK, summed it up. But basically there is going to be very little benefit for the amount of work involved, same goes for changing video libraries (at least for now). It runs fine on 64-bit and on most hardware as it is. It does not run on everything, eg. directx issues, but I dont think many commercial games etc run on all systems. I dont think it will ever run on every system under the sun, but what does, even windows doesnt!

When you think how many posts we get here in a day (dont keep up for more than 4 days, and you pretty much cant), we get very few issues that arnt resolved quickly, its just they stand out. The hardest thing about writing software, is trying to get it working on everyone's machine. MS Windows is actually a marvel in itself when you think all the hardware out there. Apple have a pretty easy life writing an OS.