You Asked US PC
by Alan Zisman
(c) 1997. First
published in Computer Player, September 1997
I have PGA Tour golf 486 which is a DOS game.
My equipment
is a 486/66 16m Ram, 2x CD Rom, Soundblaster 16. This game ran OK when
I was configured with windows 3.11. with 8m Ram I just got out of
windows and things went reasonably well. I installed Windows 95
and
increased the Ram, and thought my troubles would be over. The
game
does run but verrry sloooowly. After 10 or 11 holes of play the
computer
often will hang up.
I have two choices I guess try to figure it
out, or buy the
latest game for windows 95. Any help you can give will keep the
peace
around here.....my wife is the avid golf game player and she gets upset
when she
is in the lead at a tournament ad the computer freezes
up!
-- Kenneth M. Ralph (KenRalph@compuserve.com)
I completely understand your wife's frustration!
While I'm not familiar with that game directly, the
probable solution
is to set up the game to run in MSDOS Mode...
Does the game require that its CD-ROM be in your
CD-ROM drive? If so,
it will take a bit of work, most likely, to get an MSDOS Mode session
set
up to work properly for you.
If not, test the hypothesis, by clicking on the Start
menu's Shutdown/Restart
in MSDOS Mode option... then, see if you can use DOS commands to get
the
game started... and if it runs without crashing.
Don't be surprised if it lacks sound... we'll work on
fixing that after
we know that it runs properly in MSDOS Mode, and whether you need the
CD
or not.
I have become very curious lately regarding
postscript and PDF file
formats available for download from websites. It is my
understanding
that postscript is the "print file" format for
postscript printers
as
HPGL is to Laserjet printers. This seems fine for
people with access
to
postscript printers but for others, the only option is
to download
a
rather cumbersome viewer such as Adobe Acrobat or
GSView (is ghostscript
the same as postscript or the Portable Document
Format?).
I realize that not everyone has Word or Wordperfect
installed on
their
systems but surely it should not be necessary to
acquire "another"
program just to view complex, formatted documents when
most PC and
Mac
users already have a capable wordprocessor. Even
Wordpad included
with
every copy of Windows'95 can read Word 6 documents!
My question is: Is there any practical reason for
this format to
used to
distribute heavily formatted documents that I may be
unaware of.
Is
there some copyright advantage to not distributing an
easily editable
document? Does the PDF format have formatting
capabilities that
exceed
the common wordprocessors or HTML?
* Mike Pryor (mpryer@ionsys.co)
There are number of file formats proposed as
'universal document readers'...
including Adobe Acrobat (PDF), Common Ground, Word Perfect Envoy, and
others.
All aim to meet a generally perceived need-- to be
able to distribute
documents that are 'richer' than plain ASCII text provides, in a
relatively
compact format, that can be viewed and printers by users on a wide
range
of platforms, whether they own the original program or not.
To a certain extent, Web browser HTML is beginning to
meet that need--
but in many cases, it is too limited and clumsy a file format. Of all
the
various commercial alternatives, Adobe Acrobat seems to be the most
widely
accepted-- partly due to Adobe's clout, partly because they've widely
distributed
their free Acrobat Reader software-- in versions for Windows (16 and 32
bit), Mac, and Unix.
Acrobat files can be created out of scanned text, and
do a good job
of recreating the original, in a file size MUCH smaller than would be
the
case in most word processor formats or as a series of graphics.
For example, here in BC, the Ministry of Education
distributes copies
of its Grade 12 Provincial Exams and marking keys, over the Internet,
in
PDF format... a 35 page math document, full of graphs, and complex
equations
becomes a 40 kb file, that is relatively easily viewed or printed out
by
students and teachers... because of the graphs and equations, an ASCII
text version would be next-to-useless.
All in all, I find the free Acrobat Reader, taking up
5 megs of disk
space, a reasonable use of my computer's hard disk, and the PDF format
quite a valuable standard.
By the way-- PDF is related but not the same as
Postscript... I don't
think the Acrobat Reader can view a pure Postscript file, not can the
GhostScript
Viewer read a PDF file... GhostScript is a shareware Postscript
interpreter,
enabling a user without a 'real' Postscript printer to view and print
Postscript
documents.
While some documents are posted on the Internet in
Postscript format
(I once had to download some US Internal Revenue tax forms that way),
it
is increasingly rare.