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[Crossroads Inc.]

Ok, so DF, the ORGINAL DF... Orginal orginal, We look back on it and many who first see it say "Hey! that looks like something made in the 70's!"

Well it got me thinking... We know DF is a complicatewd game, but its graphiclly VERY simple.  If you took the orginal DF release, just how simple a computer could run it? One from the 80's? 70's ?

[IT 000]

Doubtful, it isn't the graphics that would be the problem, it would be the computing, most computers in the 70's and 80's were little more then typewriters. Designed to store text files and numbers.

[eataTREE]

I would have to download the old version and examine the DLL's to make sure, but I'm pretty sure even the original version of DF requires at least Windows 2000 to run. That would preclude it running on any computer made earlier than the mid-1990s. Of course just because it could run on a particular machine without crashing wouldn't mean it would necessarily be an enjoyable experience. 0.1 FPS anyone?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Thats what I was wondering, is how simple a computer could run it effectivly.

[eataTREE]

If you want a computer that could play the earliest released versions of DF well, you're probably looking at a high end machine from the early 00's. DF is not all that old, the earliest release was 2006.

[Il Palazzo]

If you want a computer that could play the earliest released versions of DF well, you're probably looking at a high end machine from the early 00's. DF is not all that old, the earliest release was 2006.

You're being too harsh on the computers of yore. I'm running the latest release on this one:
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/hp-evo-n410c-pentium/1707-3121_7-20212925.html
A 2001/2002-produced laptop with 256MB RAM and 1GHz processor.
Also, having too low specs would not produce 0.1 FPS, but a crash during the worldgen procedure.

[eataTREE]

If you want a computer that could play the earliest released versions of DF well, you're probably looking at a high end machine from the early 00's. DF is not all that old, the earliest release was 2006.

You're being too harsh on the computers of yore. I'm running the latest release on this one:
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/hp-evo-n410c-pentium/1707-3121_7-20212925.html
A 2001/2002-produced laptop with 256MB RAM and 1GHz processor.
Also, having too low specs would not produce 0.1 FPS, but a crash during the worldgen procedure.

That would indeed have been a sweet, sexy, banging machine in 2001, so I'm still not wrong And you only crash during worldgen for running out of RAM as far as I know, not slow CPU.

[Il Palazzo]

Oh, but that's an ultra-portable notebook for a serious professional businessman! The dedicated desktops at the time had as much as 1.8 GHz and up to 1GB RAM, if my memory serves me well.
I suppose that the basic DF version would run on a PII from 1997-9, providing there was enough RAM. Wild guesswork, of course.

[eataTREE]

I worked at a games developer (true!) in 2000 and we used 1.1 - 1.6 GhZ for our render machines, which we considered to be Godly. The game we were working on had a minimum spec of 600MhZ CPU which everyone was telling us was too high. I had the great and enviable task of testing our games on the absolute minimum spec to ensure that it could actually play on that spec without crashing miserably

[Il Palazzo]

Hehe, those were the times...

[Jake]

I worked at a games developer (true!) in 2000 and we used 1.1 - 1.6 GhZ for our render machines, which we considered to be Godly. The game we were working on had a minimum spec of 600MhZ CPU which everyone was telling us was too high. I had the great and enviable task of testing our games on the absolute minimum spec to ensure that it could actually play on that spec without crashing miserably

They tended to be rather optimistic about minimum specs back then, to my recollection.

And I've managed to get through worldgen, barely, on a PII with 256MB of RAM. It still crashed to the desktop on embark though.