{"id":93182,"date":"2016-03-21T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-21T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=93182"},"modified":"2019-03-13T10:31:40","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T17:31:40","slug":"20160321-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20160321-00\/?p=93182","title":{"rendered":"Were there specific criteria for making a game work at all costs vs. leaving it be if it had problems too weird to debug?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Boris asks, “were there specific criteria for making a game work at all costs vs. leaving it be if it had problems too weird to debug?<\/a>” <\/p>\n

I don’t recall there being any formal criteria. There was nearly always a good collection of game compatibility bugs assigned to me, which I guess wasn’t surprising since that was one of my jobs after all. Sometimes it was easy to figure out; sometimes it was hard. Sometimes it took a day; sometimes it took several days. <\/p>\n

The bugs were assigned priorities and severities by the person who found the bug. For example, something that prevents the game from running is more severe than a visual glitch in a game that otherwise seems to run fine. <\/p>\n

If the game was a major title, it was more important to fix, compared to a game that didn’t sell as many copies. For example, DOOM was a pretty high priority to get working. <\/p>\n

But overall, I was allowed to exercise my own judgment as to how much time to spend trying to fix each game. The fact that we had MS-DOS Mode available meant that there was a fallback if I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, or if I figured out what was wrong and there was no practical way around it. <\/p>\n

I”ll take the next few Mondays discussing some of the things that I had to deal with. It’s cheaper than therapy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was basically up to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-93182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

It was basically up to me.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}