FAQ

Who is Digital Gamers, Inc.?

Digital Gamers, Inc. is a software and entertainment company with the goal of creating a family-friendly on-line environment. Founder John Miller established the company after becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the anti-social content and behavior seen in many of the current on-line games. Digital Gamers, Inc. will provide a variety of classic, branded, and proprietary games to individuals and family subscribers, all for about the same cost as a single subscription to an on-line game from one of our competitors.

What products does the company offer?

The company's products include classic games (chess, checkers, card games, mah jonng, etc.) in a parlour or tournament setting, massive multiplayer role playing games, educational games, and branded games (such as Starfire).

When will these games be available?

The parlor game FishPond is currently available. The online dice game Ten Thousand is in development and will be available late in the first quarter or in the second quarter of 2004. The game PlutoCrat will begin public beta testing early in the second quarter of 2004. Portions of the Starfire Online Space Master Aides will begin public beta testing in the second quarter of 2004.

Digital Gamers, Inc. demonstrated a Java-based massive multiplayer game at JavaOne in San Francisco in 2002. Where is that game?

Development of this product, known as GumshoeTM is temporarily suspended. Although development of the core client and server technologies is largely complete, there are very significant application and content development tasks required to bring the product to market. Given the hostile investment environment of the last two years, we have not yet secured funding to complete development of this product.

It was our intention to bring the existing client technology to a sufficiently polished state that we could release a demo before announcing details about the product. That has not happened to this point as the work on Starfire Online and our parlor games has assumed a higher priority. We anticipate resuming development of this product once we have commenced commercial operations.

What type of computer do I need to play?

Digital Gamers, Inc. is committed to supporting the broadest range of target platforms possible. For that reason, we have chosen Java as the primary development language for its products. If there is a Sun-compliant Java2 virtual machine for your computer, most products will more than likely run on your computer. However, some games may function poorly on older hardware, and some of the more graphics-intensive games (particularly the role-playing products) will require a 1.4 virtual machine supporting hardware-accelerated graphics.

Where can I get Java?

Java is freely available for most types of computers. Whether you can get Java, and where you need to get it, depends upon which type of computer you are running. At this time, you should be able to download versions of Java for Linux, Max OS X, and Windows that will run Digital Gamers' products.

Digital Gamers, Inc. is committed to supporting the broadest range of target platforms possible. For that reason, Digital Gamers, Inc.has chosen Java as the development language for its products. If there is a Sun-compliant Java2 virtual machine for your computer, most products will more than likely run on your computer. However, some games may function poorly on older hardware, and some of the more graphics-intensive games (particularly the role-playing products) will require a 1.4 virtual machine supporting hardware-accelerated graphics.

Aren't there major cross-platform compatibility problems with Java?

It has been true in the past that Java code has not behaved identically on various platforms. Graphical applications were notoriously bad for this. However, this problem has diminished over the years, and careful design and testing can avoid most of the remaining trouble spots. A notable exception remains hardware-accelerated graphics in the 1.4 virtual machine on non-Intel platforms; however, we anticipate that VM developers will address this issue. Besides, consider this question: When did you last see a Solaris application written in Visual Basic?

Where can I learn more?

Visit www.digigamers.com.

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