Well, I despise Vista, quite frankly. I don't know why I clung to Win98 with emulation work until support ceased, but I did. I shouldn't have, however, because transitioning to XP was as smooth as a baby's behind. Nevertheless, I've been loading Vista systems for a few years now because some family members use it. I learned just enough to get by, but Vista is a pain-in-the-bahookus for translation work because every time I run an insertion system, it seems I must hit a bunch of extra keys to get through all of the security confirmations.
Now, Windows 7 supposedly eliminates the snail that Gates inbred into Vista. One reviewer quoted a Microsoft source who supposedly said, "Windows 7 is Vista," adding words to the effect that the snail had been expunged. Next, I hear that the top two tiers of Win7 have an XP emulator, as it were. If true - and it works as slick as the real thing - that is where I would probably live in a Win7 system, especially if it eliminates all of those security checks whenever I run home brew programs that create translated games.
Seriously, whenever I'm writing a game story, I may execute the inserter and recompile the ROM as many as four or five times a minute, cycling between it and ZSNES, hitting game reset and F4 on the emulator to access the most recent areas changed. I do this so I can quickly check the page formatting and syntax of my latest modifications. In other words, I build each and every game screen by hand so I can observe all of the visuals and aurals, tweaking each scene to perfection, a task that is impossible using an auto-formatting word processor. (To see a fine example of this process, play the beginning of Mystic Ark. By using creative punctuation and a well-timed pause tag, I synchronized the conversion of the goddess's tear into the crystal, perfectly with the opening sound of the Shrine's southern door!)
If hitting those extra security clicks each time the screen grays out causes me a time degradation of just one cycle per minute, I have lost an efficiency factor of as much as 25%. Assuming I need approximately 1000 hours to write a game using Vista, that's 250 hours wasted, or about 1-to-2 months of added production time per game just for the story writing. Or, if I'm overestimating the deleterious effects of Vista, the aggravation alone caused by plowing through Vista's extra layers of security distracts me from my muse, work flow, and overall purpose...
...unless I have missed something in Vista's options that would enable me to change settings so that user-defined, home-built insertion programs would execute each time without multiple confirmations - in other words - turn off that particularly annoying Vista feature! As I said, I learned just enough Vista to get by.
So, if anyone is using Win7 and has tried XP mode, I would be curious to learn how well it works, speed-wise and emulation support-wise.
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