Oh, you bought a notebook with an ODD this year? Regardless of ElectricPrism predictions those *are* becoming more and more scarce and harder to find. Did you bought it for gaming or office work? Was it good? Can you please tell the model?

Just playing with Google and there are still enough laptops being released with ODD that magazines are doing top 10 lists: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/laptop-with-cd-dvd-drives [External Link]

But you are the others are still missing his point, his point is not that this kind of models are not becoming scarce, it was the notion of this not being "allowed".

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Quoting: Anza

Quoting: F.UltraNote that this is not the old Microprose from Sid Meier fame. This is an Australian individual that bought the rights to the Microprose logo in 2018. The last original Micropose studios closed shop in 1999 and the brand/ip have travelled through Spectrum HoloByte, Hasbro Interactive, Infogrames, Atari Interactive, Cybergun Group, Tommo and then finally to David Lagettie from Australia who AFAIK only bought the name and not the IP.

Out of curiosity, I did some digging and there are few things to add. It's bit more than just the name, "Wild Bill" Stealey joined the company unofficially to help out. Which maybe makes more sense as I think he was more the military simulator guy and Sid Meier is probably busy doing something for Firaxis anyway.

Also David has been buying all the IP that he has been able to buy. I can't list all the Microprose military simulations by name from memory, but there seems to be quite a few of them.

There's an article from several years ago [External Link] that opens up the situation lot more.

Oh, I did not know that. Paints a far better picture and here's to hoping.

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Note that this is not the old Microprose from Sid Meier fame. This is an Australian individual that bought the rights to the Microprose logo in 2018. The last original Micropose studios closed shop in 1999 and the brand/ip have travelled through Spectrum HoloByte, Hasbro Interactive, Infogrames, Atari Interactive, Cybergun Group, Tommo and then finally to David Lagettie from Australia who AFAIK only bought the name and not the IP.

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Isn't that what Valve does with their Steam runtime containers?

Yes that is exactly what they do, one issue is however that there is only so much 3d party dependencies that Steam can manage in their runtimes plus the fact that those runtimes gets older and older and at some time one simply have to move on in order to allow new games to be allowed to use new features.

The major problem here is that Linux is made for open source development which is in stark contrast with how closed source games wants things to work in combination with (and this is not Linux specific) that close to every single library writer (with the exception of glibc) does not care for forwards compatibility.

Aka libraries can be written so that if your application is linked with glibc 3.4 but is now running on a system with glibc 4.5 and a function that you use foobar() have changed between those versions then your application would still be linked with the 3.4 version inside the 4.5 version of glibc. The reason why no one besides glibc supports this is because it is far from trivial to do (aka we would need better tools to handle this).

Another route one can do is what SDL have done as of SDL 3.x where they simply create a small 2.x shim that on the outside looks like 2.x to all applications that are linked with it but inside translates every call to the 3.x library. That way the SDL API/ABI can change from version to version but all old games/applications can not only be still supported but also actually use the new version (which improves security and can automatically add support for new things like Vulkan, pipewire and so on).

The problem ofc is that the world of dependencies are larger than glibc and SDL. So distributing your game with 100% of your dependencies bundled (aka flatpak) is another solution and actually how games are already distributed on Windows (which is the true reason why old Windows games still work today and not the myth that ABI/API:s on Windows are set in stone [remember that many games on Windows use SDL and similar open libs as well]).

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I had no idea that's how it works...Thanks for clarifying.

It is different from porting company to porting company but Feral in particular was AFAIK never hired by any firm to conduct a Linux port, instead they reached out to companies and bought the distribution rights for the macOS and Linux (and sometimes also Android) port.

This is different from e.g Aspyr what instead where hired by the game company to port their game to Linux and thus Aspyr got payed for doing the port by the game company and then the game company sells the Linux version just like they do the Windows version.

So besides the split issue that @Phlebiac brings up it is also possible that they also only bought the rights to sell their versions at specific stores (their own site, Steam and the Apple store) but that is a big unknown.

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Windows only? All three have linux ports done by Feral, it's what got me into tomb raider initially, i haven't played the other 6 or so older ones. I played all three Feral ports in Gentoo so wouldn't be getting this anyway, but would be cool if GOG provided the linux versions for them

Feral holds the copyright to the Linux versions and this is probably GOG making a deal with Square Enix and Square cannot sell the Linux versions since they do not hold the rights to them.

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so what is <currently> considered a high number of cores?

For the games listed and from their bug reports it looks to be from 24 threads and up (so 12 cores and above with hyperthreading activated).

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Never had any problem with RADV in the... Gosh, 9 years since? From all the way back with my beloved RX480. I still remember the "RADV is not a conformant Vulkan implementation: Here be dragons!" warning. How far we've come.

Great news in my opinion. I haven't noticed any ray tracing performance gap, but I'm also using a 7900XTX and avoid using raytracing on principle when I'm not checking "max settings" performance with a game.

I remember a single title, Metro Exodus, where RADV constantly crashed in the desert area of the game and I had to briefly switch to AMDVLK to complete that level. Probably since long fixed as well.

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it can reverse at up to 30 km/h

Some day some one will make something as cool as our old Strv103 that could reverse as quickly as it could go forward, 50-60km/h, since it had a backup reverse driver sitting in reverse behind the main driver.

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Somewhat OT: deepl.com translated surprisingly well for me (English<->German).

Could be an easier task (or deepl is simply better at this specific task), or we are not actually talking about a translation error but one of understanding. I simply assumed that the issue was with translation since I do not know French that well but now that I look into it further, every single translator program translates "buyback/redemption" to "rachat" and back and across various languages so perhaps I threw some dirt at the AI for the wrong reason (this time).

Except ofc when I asked it to translate it from French to German and it gave me Rückzahlung which is not entirely wrong but IMHO should be Rückkauf instead, aka Rückzahlung is more like a dividend (which a buyback could be seen as by way that it keeps the share price higher than it otherwise would be and thus giving me as a shareholder more value even if I don't get a cash dividend in my hand) but my German is rusty :)

So automatic translations can do strange and confusing things...

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