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Old 02-04-2007, 05:38 PM   #382
feldon34
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Join Date: Dec 2000

Location: Rock Hill, SC
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Originally posted by djmac:
I apologize for what I wrote.
I just had the wish that DreamScene would make me able to see the aquarium even when I was working on the Desktop, not only when I was NOT working :-)  
I don't think any offense is taken. It's just Jim's philosophy. You can run the Aquarium in a window (press the "F" key) and keep it on top (go to Settings by pressing SPACE). Or you can get a 2nd monitor to run the Aquarium.

Originally posted by djmac:
Thanks for telling me, that Goldfish was from a different artist. I really didn't know this.  
* SereneScreen Aquarium was created by Jim Sachs, of Amiga and Commodore 64 development fame. His artwork graced the covers of many magazines of the day and he created all the graphics for the game Defender of the Crown.
* Goldfish Aquarium was developed by an Hollywood special effects artist animator Eric Daniels
* DreamAquarium was developed by another Hollywood effects guru, Alan Kapler.

Originally posted by djmac:
P.S.: I don't know why, but could you tell me, why you certainly hate Microsoft and their latest Windows? (no offense, just interested)  
Microsoft really screwed us on the Microsoft Plus XP pack. It was supposed to be $20 like all the others before it and buyers get a discount on Marine Aquarium. Instead it was $40 and no discount was forthcoming. People were furious about having bought what amounted to a demo for $40 and then having to buy the Aquarium "again" for $19.95, for a total of $60. For every 1 "upgrade", there were dozens of angry phone calls from people demanding an "upgrade" price. It was a fiasco. This is what happens when you don't document conversations on videotape, audio tape, and paper.

As for writing software that only works on Windows Vista, it surprises people to know that Marine Aquarium is a 2MB download that runs on 10 year old 16MB graphics cards on computers running Windows 98. And yet it looks better than most of the other ones out there. Jim is proud of the fact that the Aquarium is lean and backward compatible. Marine Aquarium 3 will be less compatible, but he's not going to make it XP/Vista only unless a gun is held to his head. Jim spent months rewriting the Aquarium in DirectX 8 only to find out that screen savers written in DX8 run poorly or not at all on Windows 98. He scrapped this work and went back to developing the DirectX 6 version.
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Last edited by feldon34; 02-04-2007 at 09:57 PM.
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