Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20161116194210/@comment-3547390-20170114052943

3 AM my time Sunday or 10 AM your time Sunday work fine for you? I would try for today, but I can imagine communication would be difficult and it would be too last moment.

Glad to hear that, you definitely have been bogged down recently.

Stereo mixing was mandatory for something? Oh boy, that isn't promising, I use headphones with their own built in soundcard that makes it pretty much impossible to have any sort of stereo mixing. Yay. I definitely never thought I would ever need that.

Oh, my day today has been pretty fun. The week has been pretty busy and lazy for me, so I didn't install many new programs and just tested that Thief worked on Windows 8.1. This weekend I decided to get Quake up and running. Got Dosbox-Daum and set it up. Spent quite a bit of time setting it up, going through every setting and trying to get it more optimized. It works great when I play! I decide to make a test recording, setting up my recorder to go to my faster hard drive (which, oddly enough, I never did on Windows 7). Quake starts lagging ridiculously to the point that it is totally unwatchable. So I start modifying settings. I try switching hard drives, wondering if my write speed was horrible, no luck. I turn off G-Sync, I make my Nvidia profile a lot less demanding than the one I had on Windows 7, I make my preview window smaller, I deactivate my preview window, I even deactivate my second monitor. No luck. I decide it must be the "optimizations" so I copy the exact settings I used from Windows 7. No luck. I decide it must be my recording software's settings, so I transfer that over, no luck. Works great when not recording, as soon as a video is able to be seen it starts lagging horribly. Changed the entire program from Direct3d to OpenGL, no luck. I decide to test record a video of Thief. It works better... but there are momentary pauses and the end result is less stable than what we got on Windows 7. I just can't output decent quality videos using the same settings and optimized everything else on Windows 8.1.

So, needless to say, I have nothing I can blame besides Windows 8.1. Maybe it is compatibility with the latest version of the recorder, I am not sure. I honestly have nothing else I can blame, no matter how much I want to try to give Windows 8.1 as much benefit of the doubt as I can. I blocked out I prejudice I could, but now I find something that is just totally unacceptable, I just record too much for this to not be a problem. Needless to say, after a week of going with Windows 8.1 and learning workarounds for so much stuff to try to make it a decent OS and finding some silver linings, I find myself confronted by an issue I just cannot accept. So I am back on my Windows 7 rig and we won't need testing as the dual boot didn't corrupt anything. I tested Quake and Thief already on Windows 7, they work perfectly fine. So, I wasted a week setting up a OS that turned out to have a major issue, but I learned about it before I became too reliant on it. I even learned how to optimize Doxbox a little more. The difference is practically minuscule, it is not something that is the magic secret to a higher resolution, but it does make Office Hell a little less intolerable than the settings I had it on before. Don't worry too much about them unless you care about Daum, they are mostly Daum based additions. Plus I learned that the reason why my monitors always had a funky print screen when I captured both monitors was simply because I had never aligned the edges. Just when you think you are used to your OS, you find out that you can drag monitors in the screen resolution panel to align with each other. Such a stupid fix, but something I never thought about until a more prevalent issue in Windows 8.1 led to its discovery (basically I would go from the taskbar to the second taskbar, only to find I was stopped by an invisible wall due to the monitors being unaligned).

So, I took a little hiatus and learned some things. Now I can officially state Windows 8.1 is a pretty flawed OS and it not be the simple resistance to change or the dislike of the interface. Whatever was causing me to lag so horribly only existed in 8.1 and trying to find the answer online didn't result in any info. I could understand messed up settings, but when I set up everything to work perfectly and the only difference is an OS I gave a bunch of benefits to, I just don't see how I can defend it. If you don't record videos, Windows 8.1 could be a good choice for an OS, you will have to learn some workarounds and how to set up the OS, but it will actually feel more stable when gaming some older titles. But forget any chance of recording. Ironically, my CPU was made for Windows 8.1 (the 4790k) and thus I don't get "the full capabilities of my chip" by remaining on Windows 7. From my tests, I could find no benefits to CPU timing, and instead had to deal with the fun that was a ridiculous amount of video lag.

As for my comments about Thief being better on Windows 8.1, it is when not recording due to benefits you only get when recording, thus making it totally pointless. But I will say the hardest OS to install Thief on is probably Windows XP. I spent a lot more time there trying to get Thief Gold to work than anything else. Than again, it was very different in those days and I didn't know what I know now about technology. You have to ensure you allocate only 1 CPU, you need to reinstall a codec, you need to avoid particular portions of the menus and instead use cmd readmes, you need to potentially add a wrapper, and have a potential risk of corrupting your hard drive if you do certain advanced things. Oh, plus you have to routinely play maintenance to a bunch of folders. Plus if you have an AMD chip you pretty much are doomed from the start. Thief isn't the easiest of games to install, but is definitely worth it, and is a good test for compatibility with old school titles since it uses a lot of outdated technologies :P