I suspect that the increasing levels of DRM combined with customer response, will help to further reduce PC gaming to a niche market. As much as I prefer the PC's keyboard/mouse combination along with clan based community for for online gaming, I've long since converted over to the XBox. Why? Compatibility issues, DRM, patches/mod requirements just to keep up, hardware upgrade requirements and more. As much as I miss my PC for gaming, the XBox just works (and yes I need a Gold account to play online). Oh, and I can sell any XBox CD's I no longer wish to play. The thing I miss, however, is playing with my clan, so I may need to purchase a PC game every few years to play with them. This coming from someone who played Flight Simulator 1.0 on his original IBM PC.

You are indeed correct, and the 2nd link you provided fills in the details. For instance, some games made use of 'dithering' for NTSC based monitors, thus allowing you to have a greater number of colours than the palettes provided, but at a cost of resolution. I distinctly recall this with the first version of the Flight Simulator and Olympic Decathalon and wrote a few articles on it back in the day.

I remember purchasing my first IBM PC with DOS 1.0 back in December '81. Debug at the time did not include the 'a' or 'assemble' command, so I hand assembled my first programs via hex. That's bit crunching together the mod, the reg and the r/m bits in order to make an opcode. Well, at least it wasn't a 6502. . .