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Cheet Sheets 1995 February
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CHEET38.ZIP
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INSTALL.DAT
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4GAMER.TXT
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1995-02-07
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5KB
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107 lines
~Power Gamer For Windows
"A utility for running DOS games in Windows" - By Neil Gorin
~Reviewed by Alex Willmer
`Calling all GUI junkies and Windows addicts! How would you like
`to play DOS games under Windows?
`As the help file so clearly says: "Despite the popularity of
`Microsoft Windows, the DOS game (and indeed the DOS program) are
`far from dead. You may well feel at home with graphical File
`Manager type programs, but beyond card games, there are few
`challenging games for Windows" . . . "When you run your game, it
`thinks it's running under plain DOS - that's because it is!
`Power Gamer painlessly (and invisibly) closes Windows, runs your
`game and then restarts Windows for you."
`Your game will have full access to your PC, the Sound card, Joy-
`stick, etc., and will run at full speed. When I was told what
`this did I was not convinced, run DOOM 2 under Windows? - surely
`you jest! Windows hogs memory and processor power like there's
`no tomorrow. It's unstable at the best of times; if it can't
`normally multitask nibbles and notepad, I really can't imagine it
`trying the same feat with Doom and Desktop publisher.
`My picture was fiddling about with configs and spending hours
`trying to get it up and running. Power Gamer can't quite manage
`that. (What were you expecting? A miracle?). It doesn't work by
`shunting Windows into virtual memory or anything fancy like that.
`It does work, though, and flippin' well at that. How it works is
`so blatantly simple, it makes you wonder why nobody thought of it
`before. All Power Gamer does is to shut-down Windows, then run
`the game under DOS. When you're finished, it simply restarts
`Windows and everything's fine. The help file says: "Power Gamer
`allows you to add any DOS game to a Windows Program Group, with
`the virtual guarantee that it will run!" As far as I can see, it
`does! I've tested it without mercy, throwing various obscure
`system monitors and big word processors at it, but no matter how
`hard I tried, I could not get it to crash.
`On the whole, Power Gamer is good. It only uses at most 5k of
`precious memory, and this can quite easily be dropped to 2k. It's
`easy to add a game to program manager; simply set it up as you
`would normally, and then add "pwrgamer" to the beginning. A
`generous range of icons are supplied with the program, although
`some are taken from Window's own range.
`There are some down-sides to Power Gamer. The help file is
`limited: it has just enough to allow you to get Power Gamer
`running with your favourite game. There could be more. The hints
`'n' tips section is limited to the use of parameters, avoiding
`batch files, freeing 3k of memory and setting up mice. Options
`are limited to being able to turn a warning message off. That is
`all that you would really need, I suppose, so it isn't a bad
`thing. There aren't many other complaints I can make about it.
`It closes anything you're running, down, and lets "Do you want to
`save untitled.txt?" and other such annoying but necessary
`messages through. One very brilliant thing I found was that
`Power Gamer doesn't let "Are you SURE you want to exit Windows?"
`get a sniff at the inside of your screen.
`One major problem is something nobody can do anything about it:
`the classic memory. No matter what you need, it's a problem at
`the best of times. Assume you've battled Himem and won, and have
`found a memory configuration that will actually work with Doom 2,
`you will then find that this config is Window's worst nightmare,
`and that Windows'll be running like a snail on sedatives. (Yes,
`this does include you chaps with more money than sense, that
`already own an over-priced Pentium.) (Sorry, just had to add
`that little gripe in!!)
`Power Gamer isn't disk space hungry either. The measly 300k it
`takes, gives you the program, the help file, all the 'read-me'
`files and a DLL file. The installation was easy.
`All in all, Power Gamer is very good. Running games under Windows
`is no task for the faint hearted. Neil Gorin could have written
`a complicated program that wrote & finely tuned pifs (Microsoft's
`own sad attempt at games under Windows.) Instead, he's come up
`with an ingenious method that's easy and simple to use. Power
`Gamer uses comparatively no memory & due to good programming (or
`luck!), is almost impossible to crash! (An amazing feat under DOS
`alone.)
~`If you have to run games under Windows, you have to have Power
~`Gamer. Neil Gorin I salute you.
83%
~"Despite a few quibbles a brilliantly polished off piece."
`-----------------------------------------------------------------
`The shareware version (v.1.00) is available on the editor's
`trainer disk number 24. (View the option "Trainers and DOX disks"
`from the articles section of Cheet Sheets issue 35 or above), and
`the registered version costs £14.95 available from Neil Gorin.
`(See the 'about' button below for more details.)