|
|
Pinball is Saved in the Upgrade
Like most other writers in the computer industry I have plenty of comments to share about the upgrade to Win98, if I haven't mentioned them already. When I upgraded to Win98, I had to get a patch from Symantec to stop blue-screen errors from appearing nearly everywhere. I had to download new graphic drivers from Matrox to stop RealPlayer from bombing out. I had to reinstall Delphi V1.5 for my Windows 3.1 programming. I had to reinstall numerous screensavers (they were all removed), file compression programs, and on and on.
But my "Space Cadet" pinball score was safe.
I had just finished the upgrade of the year, the upgrade that has caused headaches, IT staff irritation, and the upgrade that even has received a warning sign from major PC manufacturers. Problems upon problems have occurred with this Win98 upgrade, but my multi-million pinball score was safe.
In case you don't know about Space Cadet pinball, it was created by Maxis for Microsoft Plus! 95. It was a great demonstration of the then-new ability of Windows 95 to actually play real games under a windowed operating system. Never mind that you could do that with the Amiga or Macintosh, that was besides the point. Now, there was actually a solid non-card game that would work flawlessly under Windows. It is still a very addictive pinball game.
It may seem strange that all of these problems occurred yet the pinball high score still remains, but let me explain. In Microsoft Windows 3.1, configuration settings were held in .INI initialization files. These files cluttered up the C:\WINDOWS and other directories, and they were hard to maintain. With Windows 95 came the introduction of the registry. These two files, SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT, are huge bulky files that clutter up the hard drive since you have to make backup files regularly - without them, you have to reinstall Win95. These files are hard to maintain unless you like using Microsoft's registry editor.
O.K., OK, maybe I'm being a little harsh, it's just because I had a system with 50 registry backups because they kept getting corrupted. One byte of invalid data to an .INI file rarely shut down the system like registry errors can. But, when the registry idea was created, Microsoft urged developers to use the registry to store initialization items, such as window sizes, last used filenames, and game scores - not .INI files. Some people listened, others didn't <cough cough>.
Anyway, when I upgraded from Win95 to Win98, the SYSTEM folder was purged of all .INI files. Any program requiring .INI files was in serious jeopardy. Most such programs had to be reinstalled. But programs that used the registry worked fine, for the most part. Now I see that when Microsoft makes a 'suggestion' to developers, you had better follow it or face the consequences.
So, in case you are having problems with older applications, you probably just ought to reinstall them. Get newer, updated programs like Maxis' pinball games, where the information is stored in the registry. By the way, in case you're interested, my high score is 9,810,000.
Article copyright 1998 Andrew Malek - All Rights Reserved. This article may not be redistributed without permission of Andrew Malek. All trademarks mentioned in this article are owned by their respective companies.
|
|
|
