Mail Archives: djgpp/1999/04/15/14:35:13
Daniel & Linda Duarte wrote:
>
> I am working on my first game using djgpp v2 and allegro 3.11 and am
> almost done. I am working on a pentium 166mmx w/ 64megs ram. How do I tell
> how much the minimun system requirement will be for others who would be
> interested in the game?
Either you test, or you guess.
The minimum requirement for any DJGPP program is a 386 and "some"
memory. (64K can work, in theory.) Because of Allegro, they'll
presumably need a VGA card as well (or better, depending on the
resolutions you try to use). Of course you can figure out how much hard
drive space will be needed.
For a game, presumably swapping will result in unacceptable performance,
and so you might find the memory used by the program via
__dpmi_memory_information and the
total_allocated_bytes_of_virtual_memory_client field. As far as CPU
speed goes... you could use the Pentium time-stamp counter to find how
many clocks each frame (or other similar iteration) of the game takes,
then use that to estimate the minimum necessary clock speed for a
"reasonable" frame rate (whatever you think that might be). You might
scale it by a few times if you base your estimates on older CPU
generations (i.e. a 486 might be 2 times slower than a Pentium at the
same clock speed). But all this is going to be a bit fuzzy.
My recommendation would be to suggest as the minimum the stuff the FAQ
talks about, and solicit reports from users to see how slow a machine
can still run it acceptably.
--
Nate Eldredge
nate AT cartsys DOT com
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