Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-26533925-20151203194947/@comment-24577221-20151213225425

Raduzhok wrote:

I would like to know how you were able to get rid of the 'software update' as I have a WIN8.1 and after upgrading to WIN10, which didn't work for my system, the MS techs downgraded me back to WIN8.1, but I'm continuing to get the pop up to upgrade to WIN10 and I don't want it, and want to stop those reminders. One of them gave me the option to upgrade now or later, and I clicked later, and it started to schedule a time, so I cancelled that. I'd appreciate knowing how to get rid of that reminder and other things having to do with WIN10.

You'll need to go to Windows Update, then to Installed Updates, and remove the "update" named KB3035583. Then you'll need to "hide" that update so Windows doesn't just go ahead and reinstall it. You will probably need to restart your machine to complete the job.

Depending on your system, you may need to go deeper. If you do a web search for "KB3035583", you'll find a variety of instructions on how to do that. Small'n'Limp hasn't made it easy, or obvious. Also, above you mentioned people can use android emulators like BlueStacks. Is that a tablet? What is an Android emulator? We switched over and began the game again on our Kindle devices, and this newest update, 1.3.7 is incompatible with the earliest generation kindle fire, which we have. We want to get another device, but are not sure which ones will continue to grow with the BBB changes. While MSM started out as a free game, it's now starting to become highly expensive to keep playing if we have to buy a new device every time they make a new version available. There are a number of different Android devices. By definition, they run the Android operating system. They run various software applications which come from a variety of sources, such as Google Play and the Amazon store.

Some of the Android devices, such as the Kindle and Samsung devices, are hardware. Some of them, such as BlueStacks and Andy, are software -- virtual machines. The virtual machines run as programs under Windows. (And I gather that Andy runs under other operating systems as well.  It's a virtual machine that's built using VirtualBox, and should run equally well on any machine that supports V'Box.)  They, in turn, run the Android OS, and inside that, various Android apps can run. The virtual machines are sometimes referred to as emulators, but that's a bit misleading. Each one emulates being a physical device, but they don't emulate being specific kinds of physical devices -- that is, they don't try to pretend that they're Kindles or Samsung devices or whatever. They're their own individual devices.

There are some differences among Android devices in terms of how their screens/monitors/displays work, as well as other features such as cameras and microphones. They have software drivers which take commands from apps, and interpret them to get the proper effects on the displays and so on. The virtual machines have the same kinds of drivers: they take the apps' commands and apply them to the Windows host machine, which has its own drivers to drive its own features. These should all work seamlessly regardless of which device, but it's not always that simple. The virtual machines are perhaps a bit more likely to have problems with apps because of the extra steps... and perhaps because most apps aren't tested with virtual machines.

Some older versions of MSM crashed if you tried to record sound with the Recording Studio on earlier versions of BlueStacks and Andy, for example. (You can find some discussion of these kinds of problems in this wiki, if you search it for "BlueStacks" or "Andy".)  I gather that the same problem appeared with the Kindle, when the Recording Studio was added to the game.

At present, both MSM and DoF run pretty well under BlueStacks. The only problems with DoF that I've found so far that are clearly due to its operation with BlueStacks are a couple of graphics problems: incorrect locations of crystals, which made them hard to collect, and some animations and graphics elements that show only as black. The crystal location thing has been fixed now.