They are usually illegal.

Was it trying to get the TV tuning stuff set up? That's always been a pain (and usually time-consuming), but TBH I've used most of the TV/DVR software from the past 10 years or so and Windows 7 Media Center was actually the easiest to set up and one of the most reliable, surprisingly. Not very customizable or feature-rich, but it does the best job of automated setup that I've seen and has the broadest compatibility with tuning hardware. Of course, YMMV.

That said, now that I've replaced all of my tuner cards and USB devices with SiliconDust devices doing the TV tuning stuff is no longer difficult or problematic. If you're serious about doing a DiY DVR I think it's the only way to go...especially if you're going the CableCARD route for encrypted channels.

They didn't coin a new term. Windows also offers compatibility layers. The difference between an emulator and a compatibility layer is the way it does things.

DOSBox is an emulator. It emulates the Entire IBM PC + MS-DOS. One line further in the Emulator article on Wikipedia (why didn't you quote it?) " This focus on exact reproduction of behavior is in contrast to some other forms of computer simulation, in which an abstract model of a system is being simulated." really hits the point home. Wine isn't after exact reproduction of Windows. All it wants to do is add hooks to the Unix subsystem to Windows applications. You can think of it as a "translation box" if you will. It doesn't claim to offer a high degree of compatibility or to match Windows features, just help with transitioning to Windows. Emulators have significantly higher overhead compared to a compatibility layers.

Examples of compatibility layers are Microsoft's own compatibility layer, Wine, Mac OS X's old (discontinued) compatibility layer for Mac OS 9 (Apple completely changed the OS from 9 to X), and BSD's Linux compatibility layer.

So,
Emulator pros: Has the potential to perfectly match the system being emulated.
Emulator cons: Significantly higher overhead, requires a LOT of work.

Compatibility layer pros: simpler, can offer significantly better performance, translates the foreign API to something the system can understand allowing better integration.
Compatibility layer cons: more likely to not work, incomplete compatibility can cause some applications to perform extremely poorly.

Oh no. If I ever got that far, that would have been something.

No, it turned out that the OS could only really be installed by an OEM. I even spent days trying to slipstream MCE into a XP Pro install disk (which is how MS tells you do to this if you dig past the page that just says put the disk in and choose install, which won't work) but any screw up on the install (which was inevitable) required a DBAN to the drive to wipe the registry so I could start over again. You had to swap back and forth between the disks during the install, but the files were on both disks, at least with the same name. But there were enough differences between them that the proper files were the only ones to make this work. If too much of the OS was installed by one disk or the other, it would hose everything.

Here is the last thing I tried, and failed at doing

http://winsupersite.com/article/windows-xp2/slipstreaming-windows-xp-with-service-pack-3-sp3-128464

I even contemplated at one point over buying an OEM MCE installed machine, and then just putting the Mobo and HDD in another case so I could add what I needed. But, I had already spent $200 on the OS's and the OEM machine was $349 (the cheapest I could find at the time)

Ironically, by the time I got Windows 7, I already had my DLNA server set up, rendering MCE moot.

Oh, yeah, that. Sorry to hear you had a brush with that monstrosity...the MCE they tried to shoehorn into XP was a total clusterfrack. I never even attempted to use it. At the time I was using Beyond TV (R.I.P., old friend) for the TV tuner/DVR stuff and a variety of other things for media playback. Much simpler and worked really well.

I've never had great luck using DLNA to stream to a playback appliance. Some things worked well, but I've always eventually run into CODEC issues, so all of my media clients are actual PCs now. I'm sure newer client devices have gotten better with format support, but I like the flexibility that comes with being able to set up the client however I want to. Are there DLNA devices that can work as TV clients yet (can change live TV channels, etc.)? That's definitely a deal breaker for me.

Thanks. I actually got that definition from a glossary in a book...low tech I know. It didn't have a definition for 'compatibility layer'. Just an aside, I've seen that exact same 'think of it as a translation box' anology in a discussion of DOSBox, which you and it's creators say is an emulator.

I guess this divergence of 'compatibility layers' from 'emulators' goes back further than WINE then, but I still don't really see a big difference in ultimate goal or results. The differences you have made clear enough and I'm happy to learn, but from the basic use point of view (where exactly what goes on in the box is relatively unimportant compared to the outcome) they seem very similar.

I don't know why any DOSbox dev would call it a translation box. DOSBox handles all the API calls itself. The only thing it tells the host is on-screen painting. There's not really any translating.

A compatibility layer goes like this: application talks to compatibility layer. Compatibility layer tells the system "Hey, this guy just said "foo" which translates roughly to "bar" in your language." It hooks into the OS and passes API calls after translating them

As to the difference, it's in their goals. Emulators want to provide a full, complete experience. Compatibility layers are like cushions for a transition. Windows provides a legacy compatibility layer for running older software under different settigns (right-click a shortcut and go to the compatibility tab to access it). In the long-run they want you to upgrade. Mac OS X provided a compatibility layer for OS 9 because at the time there wasn't much OS X software and lots of people still had OS 9 software. They ended it after that because the transition period was over. Wine likewise is to help people move to Linux by providing an ability to run their legacy Windows applications. Finally, BSD understands that more software targets Linux then BSD itself, so provides a compatibility layer in order to gain access to more software until they get more software.

Wasn't a DOSBox dev, just someone much like you trying to explain to someone much like me what DOSBox was about. It takes program made for system X and makes it work on system Y. WINE takes program made for system A and makes it work on system B.

The rest strikes me as similar to trying to explain the difference between a diesel engine and a gas engine (or a Mazda gas rotary engine) to a driver that may or may not even do their own oil changes. I appreciate the explanation myself, because I'm pretty curious about almost everything, but from a practical standpoint it doesn't seem like a terribly important distinction at the user level.

This may seem like a technicality or semantics thing, but DOSBox actually doesn't make a DOS program work on Windows. The DOS program runs completely within DOSBox, then DOSBox asks Windows to paint an image of what DOSBox "sees" for you to see.

You'd be right for the most part, that the distinction is almost entirely technical. The only real distinction is that in a compatibility layer, foreign applications are more or less treated as first-class citizens by your OS. This means they behave more-or-less like any native application would Min/max/etc all work and other system actions (should) just work, such as copy and paste.

Programs running in emulators aren't first-class citizens. Your OS is completely unaware of their existance. The emulator would be a first-class citizen, but without doing some really tricky things, the applications within it don't even pretend to appear as first-class citizens.

From an end-user perspective, the first option is "prettier" though it does have a downside: an application in a compatibility layer can cause the entire OS to crash, whereas an application in an emulator should, at most, only be able to cause the emulator to crash (though I guess if the emulator is badly written, it could cause the OS to crash too).

That's really the only distinction between the two that I can think of that is visible to the end-user.

As I've thought all along i don't see any selling point to get a steam machine if you're a console gamer and I don't get what demographic this is aimed at, when this things gets a solid couple of years of excellent exclusives then it might start to challenge consoles.Seriously it's a pc with a controller and steam what's the USP?

Thanks for taking the time to explain so well.

Since the only things I consider running that aren't just natives of the system would be games and I don't generally multi-task games I don't think I would ever notice the differences much myself. I know people now are more 'up with the times' because I see discussions about whether game such and such can be safely alt-tabbed or whatever, but I was formed in the days of 'make a boot disk because this game need all the resources you have and you'll just have to reboot after' and I never really moved beyond it.

Some of the prices are actually really good with these machines. The $499 machine with the 4th-gen i3 + GTX 760 is actually a good deal when you add up all the parts needed to build one manually.

Now about the controller. If the anolog joysticks are being replaced with track-pads then it's essentially the same thing as playing 'dual anolog' virtual sticks on a tablet. Which is the worst way to play a game. The worst. The absolute worst.

That's what I thought too, but apparently the fact that you can tell where your thumbs are within the tracking area makes a big difference (you can feel the borders of the tracking area, the curvature, the button in the center, etc.). My main issue with virtual trackpads on touchscreens is that I can only tell where the center and edges of the tracking area are by trying to remember the thumb position or actually looking at that part of the screen (no tactile feedback). I'm still skeptical, but I'm going to have to try it before I can judge.

Beyond worst. But i've yet to see any good tablet control scheme for a game that involves more than poking things on the screen

Best thing to do for DLNA is to get something like the WDTV Live, about $49 now. But to integrate DLNA with a Tuner, your best to get a TV that is compliant. However, I could not get this to work on my Viero that has DLNA, but I did not dig too much into that (codec issues, but the TV is updatable). I have found on that the more open source the source file is, in other words MP4/MP3 and not WMV, then the more success you have with DLNA. Some WMV works just fine, but if the file was created back in the Vista era, maybe late XP era when MS was really cranking up the DRM (because of their HD DVD initiative), then those probably won't work.

I have also found that the server software has just as much to do with success as the device. So that can get in your way of success.

I can't even imagine doing that. I don't have a tablet, so I have not gamed on one. I don't game much on the iPhone that I have other than a poker game that I mess around with. I can't imagine using a track pad as a control stick. Maybe a selection input device for menus.

I can see the Steam gamepad being useful for playing a game like Dragon Age Origins provided you dramatically increase the size of the fonts so they are readable. Maybe, possibly, a RTS game as well.

I think the controller is definitely in the 'don't knock 'til you've tried it' category, but I'm gonna play ignoramus here, if you have a $1500 dollar rig upstairs, why pay $499 to stream when you can spend $50 on some long cables?

Pretty much every RTS game I play, in order to 'play well' you need a comfortable familiarity with hotkeys so a keyboard is the primary controller. I usually keep the difficulty toned down to where I can get by using a mouse, but when a game somehow gives me that desire to 'really beat it' like I have something to prove I go to hotkeys.

The steam machines in that price range are not to stream to, they are gaming PCs designed to co-habitate alongside the more traditional #^th gen consoles in a living room environment.

With cables, signal strength (and thus quality) tends to diminish with longer distances.

You could potentially get yourself a very cheap (under $200) lower-power PC to connect to the TV and install SteamOS on it then run your games remotely on your main gaming rig. Long cables are ok, I guess, but ethernet and wifi are much simpler, more convenient, and better-suited for long runs through a house. That, and the overall GUI people tend to like to use on a desktop machine isn't well-suited for use on a TV with a controller or remote. A dedicated machine in the living room could have a launcher UI designed to be easy to use on a TV for the limited number of things you'd want to use it for.

I'll just respond to this as I play on both.

First and foremost: It won't replace PC gaming. Just won't.

If a console gamer really wants mods on their console games, they can do it. I know all about the legality issues, but let's not be blind to the fact that it can happen and does happen. Most console games don't care about modding, that's why they get consoles. As with any marketing strategy, you have to show those games what they are doing now and how your machine can do it better. Example for me when it came down to the decision to go PS3 over 360 was the Live vs. PSN. PSN was free and pretty reliable, not quite on par with Live but it was still free and for 90% of my online activity, it got the job done extremely well (online competitive or cooperative gaming). It got better as time went on. So what do you got now? PSN and Live both charge money for mostly the same service on their next gens (though you don't need PSN to use streaming services or free-to-play online games). As someone who knows the Sony fanbase quite well, most were willing to pay the price for the Plus when it came to the PS4 and their recent sales figures shows that (4.2 Million). What does the Steam Machine offer? Free online multiplayer access, the bread and butter of gaming in last generation of gaming. I know there are a lot of people that don't do online gaming, prefer it to be solitary, but the numbers show those people are a minority so for the Steam Machine, they need to push that fact about the free online service and push it HARD!. The next thing that is almost on the same level is the games. Get the Madden, get the Call of Duty, get the GTA, get the Battlefield...get all the major online gaming to make the game available on Steam. It's a must. You need to target the biggest audiences, not all of them, but you got to get at least one of them.

These two things is what is going to draw the Xbox and Playstation players to the Machine is if you can say "Hey, we got the big games you guys love, plus you don't need to pay to play online". Afterwards, once you grab their attention you show some games you don't get on the consoles and show them how easy it is to upgrade that machine. If they don't plan on accomplishing at least the first thing, it's not going to matter.

Remember what the consoles are, it's not just a gaming platform but an experience that is
1.) inexpensive
2.) standard
3.) easiest to setup and enjoy right away

Because it's an experience and you want to offer the widest array possible, console gamers will keep going to them because they have the games they want on a platform they can get. I love it personally because I don't need to do anything and games will run. My investment came to be about $75/year for the PS3 (not including games) compared to my PC investment in years prior being about $100/year. It's a value thing and unless a Steam Machine can exceed that value and give me the experience I want, it won't be replacing Sony in my livingroom. And many console gamers are going to share that exact same sentiment, be it Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo.

People who are more concerned about having the highest specs than the best gaming experience I suppose.

Isn't "best gaming experience" a pretty subjective concept?

That said, how about the people that are already PC gamers that just want to play their games in their living rooms as well as on their desktop rigs? Doesn't that make more sense than people just wanting to have the highest specs?

For example, if I didn't already set up a living room machine myself and I wanted to buy a pre-made machine to play games in my living room I'd probably be more likely to buy a Steam machine than a console. Why would I want to re-buy all of the games I already own just to play them in a different room?

That's an excellent point.

The XBox ONE and the Playstation 4... they only play the new games they make for the platform.

It would be awesome if I could pop a copy of "Freelancer" into the Steambox and be able to play that!

Is that the sort of thing they have in mind?