I decided, in the name of Science!, that I'd try to generate a '257:257' world that would have a bit of history for me when I embarked.
10 000 years of history, in fact! I completely botched all megabeasts so that there would be no risk of them razing every civilization by year 2000... The World of Enchantments started to generate.
52 rejects, alright. Nothing to worry about. The 'recounting legends part, where the ages add up one after one, would be a bit tougher. It worked quite well up until 1700, where progress slowed down slightly. I eventually left the computer alone and went outside (!). When I came back, late-night-ish, it was on 2600. Damn. So I decided to leave it on while I slept to the sluggish drone of an overworked laptop. Incidentally, my good laptop is being repaired in some computer rehab in god know's where. So this ... five-year old laptop, defragmented to the point that not even it's own metaphorical mother would recognize it, carried on with the cumbersome task of creating this Old & Huge World.
I woke up after a good 13 hours of dreaming about gargantuan bees living in a world of heavy machinery, ...for some inexplicable reason. 3400? Oh yeah! I did feel a bit disheartened, but it went away when I experimented with using other programs while DF was running in the background. It worked! Success! I played a wee bit o' Morrowind, and finished Planescape: Torment. Two games I heavily recommend, by the by. I left the laptop alone for the rest of the day, and set the 'dwarffortress.exe' process to RealTime through Windows Task Manager. By the third day it had reached 6549: By the fourth it was 7108. The fifth; 7463. I could see that it wasn't marching forward anymore, it was more of a crawling close encounter with the floor. My laptop felt tired too, and so were I. I reasoned that I could let it go on a bit more, since Toady One hadn't released the update yet (And still hasn't! :c) By the seventh and final day I had to pull the plug from the laptop due to it going into some catatonic state where no input whatsoever seemed to affect it.
It was stuck on 8621. 86% complete. Damn. The experiment failed, the dream shattered. Oh well. What's your thoughts, feelings, threats? Have anyone done anything like this before, and are there saves?