MaverickUK wrote on 2022-09-13, 12:49:
Would it be possible to run this on a sub-Pentium processor, if it could be configured to run in a low-detail mode?
I haven't done performance measurements, so I'm not sure what the current bottleneck is (rasterization or some other part). The game is written in a small VM/interpreter I've written (which could be the bottleneck), and the vector math relies on fast floating point, but maybe a 486 DX2 is good enough. It could of course be ported to be fully in C and to use integer math only, but I won't have the time to spend on it, unfortunately.
You'd have to test it, I don't have pre-Pentium hardware here at the moment -- K6-2 (or 3? I never remember...) is the "oldest" CPU I have here, and it works fine there.
Do report back if you test it. If it's just a little bit too slow, turning off the background stars or turning the ship into line vectors could be enough, and that might be something I'd be willing to do if there's an audience for it.
(Shameless plug: If you haven't played "Loonies 8192" yet, see the Loonies 8192 thread, which has builds available in the thread that should work all the way down to a 286 or even a 8086 -- so I have "covered" the pre-Pentium era in that other game project previously, "You Be At Orbit" is most likely for Pentium or newer, but might work on 486-class CPUs as well).