Sender: nate AT cartsys DOT com Message-ID: <37163077.B090E16@cartsys.com> Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 11:31:19 -0700 From: Nate Eldredge X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.08 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.5 i586) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: system requirements? References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com 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