rasz_pl wrote on 2024-09-24, 17:44:

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-24, 04:53:

At first I played the game on my 80386DX-20 with 4MB RAM and ET4000/W32, with no apparent lag. It was also the first game asking me to choose an appropriate VESA driver.

To me word "lag" implies implicit delay. In literature its widely believed 100ms to be a threshold where users starts getting annoyed, thats less than 6 fps. Open big city and starts scrolling, do you get more than 6 fps? From memory it was more like 1-2 fps on 386/ISA system 🙁

For a long time minimum reqs was defined as setup able to boot game without crashing instantly 😀

Well, SC2K was never an "action" or "real-time" game to me: bulldozing, air crashing, train and ship moving, and other animations were fun, but I always froze the time when making big decisions. I moved around the map with centering tool instead of scrolling, a habit "inherited" from the original Railroad Tycoon. Re-centering took a while (0.5-1 second at first and up to 2-3 seconds in a fully developed city) but not a big problem.

SC2000 cycles palettes to animate a lot of things and only does partial refreshes for changes in tiles, it'd only get really bad with the alien or fires

A 386 doing SC2k is far more playable than a SNES... 😀