Just rebooted this game and wow!

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by MarkSheppard

Are there any other "war stories" you can tell us?

I can't help but wonder if the AI cheating in the old SSI code was due to:

A.) Not enough CPU cycles in 1995 to do an AI that did a lot of deep thinking -- the SP2 reqs were for a 486 DX/2 66 MHz -- but I think it was "kinda sorta" playable on 386s.

B.) Not enough time to code everything, remember the team also had to now make OBAT files for fifty years (1950-2000) for about two dozen nations; in an era before the internet.

Likely a shortcut to make the AI more competetive with restricted CPUs of the day and also memory. PBEM replay as I recollect was brought in as a patch to SP1 after a year or so and it required a hefty (for the day!) RAM upgrade to - IIRC - 2MB.

Those were the days when you had multiple MSDOS boots using different calls to HIMEM and other such routines (there was some other one than HIMEM) for handling of memory above 640K, sound card setups etc. And DR_DOS was briefly the king O/S over Microsofts since you could make a boot loader script that asked you which config.sys setup you wanted, Microsofts one (of the day) needed fiddling IIRC with config.sys(es) since it couldnt ask a question on bootup, so you had to have several on disk and renamed the file(s) and rebooted for the particular game (like Task Force 1942). And DR_DOS was cheaper than MSDOS as well if I remember it right.

[MarkSheppard]

[quote=Mobhack;853077]

Originally Posted by MarkSheppard

Likely a shortcut to make the AI more competetive with restricted CPUs of the day and also memory. PBEM replay as I recollect was brought in as a patch to SP1 after a year or so and it required a hefty (for the day!) RAM upgrade to - IIRC - 2MB.

Also, back then development cycles were severely compressed -- we've gotten used to games taking three or four years to be released today; something possible only because video game consoles took over enough of the market to force graphical stasis.

Back then, you might have a year or less to code a game. So shortcuts had to be taken.

Those were the days when you had multiple MSDOS boots using different calls to HIMEM and other such routines (there was some other one than HIMEM) for handling of memory above 640K, sound card setups etc.

Now there's stuff I haven't heard in a long time...I do remember QEMM being the best for automagically moving everything into different areas to magically open up enough convnetional memory to run jst about everything with no need for boot disks.