Re: Announcement from Blastbay Studios
I agree with Draq (post 39) in that ease of use was one of BGT's main selling points and intentions from the beginning. Of course this approach had its fair share of drawbacks as the community had witnessed. Well, nobody could actually have forced anyone to learn a mainstream language if that individual didn't want to, anyway. From now on, once the day comes when BGT games start producing more problems, compatibility or security wise, on modern Windows 10 builds than they are worth, and people stop wanting to play BGT games because getting them to even run would simply be a pain in the neck, these guys, including myself actually, will have no other option. They will either have to give up on the thought of game development altogether because it would require them to invest more time and energy than they are willing to or than they have available, or they will have to just try to move on to something more mainstream.
Speaking of virtual machines, I really wish there was one of Windows XP with NVDA already configured to launch on startup made for Hyper-V. I would really love to play BSC Games again out of nostalgia but no matter what I tried, I couldn't get them to run on my Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. I tried several VmWare machines with screen readers but even if I disable Hyper-V in optional Windows features, VmWare still complains about Hyper-V and VmWare being incompatible and wants me to remove the Hyper-V role from the system. Having searched the net, I found some way to disable it completely, because something about Windows Defender's application safeguard is said to be using the Hyper-V technology as well. However, turning that off involves a pretty complex and not exactly accessible modification of UEFI. I'm really not doing that, spending so much time and effort, just to be able to run a VMWare machine of XP. Besides, I'm not sure what this would or wouldn't do to my system's security.
There used to be like 3 ancient XP laptops lying around the household of my parents, all of them so slow, overheating, with broken displays or keyboards and also probably full of viruses as I haven't been maintaining them for the last couple of years, that they were no longer being used by anyone. So I downloaded the Starwind Converter software and wanted to come over for like an afternoon to take one of these and create a VHD image of its hard drive, but unfortunately I was told that they were no longer there. My mom has either given away or even trashed them all. Even after having successfully converted some of the screen-reader-enabled XP VMWare machines into the VHDX format with Starwind and run the machines, I was not able to get a single screen reader to run no matter what. I would need a VM of an already working and configured XP installation that has a screen reader configured to launch on startup. And since I don't have any access to any old XP physical computers any more, I'm running out of options. I don't want to build one out of an ISO image or something like that. A) the XP installer doesn't talk, and b) who knows where the images floating around the internet come from and how reliable or secure they are. I'd actually be willing to pay a reasonable amount of money to anyone willing to create a Hyper-V XP VM with an autostarting screen reader, preferably NVDA, for me. Nothing else needs to be on the system, just the bare essentials of XP and NVDA is fine. I know I could get like sighted help to build the machine or anything but I simply don't have the time and energy to do that right now. If I do have time and energy, I want to spend them in a more useful way, like writing my novels or developing my games.
I'd do that preferably over Paypal. Apple Pay's send cash feature doesn't currently work in my area, I don't use Google Pay and I don't know of any other method that would be as user-friendly, readily available and comfortable to use for both the recipient and the sender.
Let's say I'd pay 15 to 20 bucks if you just have a VMWare VM already lying around somewhere, that would only need to be converted over to VHDX and tested to verify that NVDA does in deed start up on its own, or that the ctrl+alt+n keystroke works without any issues, right after booting.
I'd pay 30 to 40 bucks if you had to build and test the machine from scratch using an XP image.
And I'd pay 50 to 60 bucks if you actually had to take an old physical laptop and build the VM using a program like Starwind.
Lukas
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