SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

With today's powerful systems do we really know if our code is efficient?

With that thought in mind I decided to experiment and buy one of the cheapest PC's online I could find! I paid £109.99...But looking now I see it's gone up in price to £119.99.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CLV2MM5W?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

A good idea if you want to sell software...

I create education software for schools. And therefore we always need stone-old computers, to test the software on the typical german school equipment.
So we still test the software also against WIN-7 and WIN-8 on Celeron-CPUs.

And it was 2015, when we gave up Windows XP... against the resistance of a lot of our customers...

Oh definitely.

Ah yes, that is more CPU/OS limited though and a nightmare to support - WindowsXP?!...I was thinking more along the lines of games software, with limited CPU and GPU power.

I remember having a cheap Atom Netbook back in 2010. It could still play Quake 3. So even the cheap devices can handle a lot.

My main laptop was a 250 dollar celeron laptop for a couple of years. If only it had a ssd then. It would be more than enough for things I programmed. It could sometimes take a half an hour to an hour for it to be a bit responsive.

Maybe pico 8 would be a nice way to test out ideas? It has tight limits.

Playbasic is good for  lower spec coding because it can run Direct x 1 LOL

Quote from: Hotshot on March 02, 2024, 19:16:11Playbasic is good lower spec coding because it can run Direct x 1 LOL

I started my PC programming with PlayBasic It's very good it just wasn't compiled.

Baggey

i dont know whether i started pc in 1998 or 2000 and coding circa 2004
i remembered writing code for rs but that could be fantasy hahh. how i were able to have someone give me the code of winterlove (i am winterlove) that i leaked is unknown who or why i only remember wanting to code my own of the game.
well the first pc i used was windows 98 and then xp. but my 30$ phone can play rs3. : o

When I first started with PC's back in late 97, early 98, I had just put my beloved A1200 into a box which eventually ended up in my mother shed. A broken rear window and heavy storm took care of that, along with most of the other stuff I had stashed there a few months later, sadly.

I'm not sure if Win98 was even a thing then, but it was still 95 on the first PC that a mate helped me to build. It was surreal getting used to using this after all the years of running Workbench. I used to reformat the thing at least once a month back then, as I was buying so many pc mags and installing crap cover disc software on it. That one time I went to re-install it by using format *.*, or whatever the command was from dos, and then realised I didn't have a cd driver loaded so I couldn't start the windows cd installing.......

Anyway, I bought a couple of stick PC's for use in my previous job, a few years back, and found I seem to still have one from when I was setting them up at home. These are slightly larger than a USB drive, and pretty low-spec, but they do have Windows 10 on them pre-installed, which is pretty handy. A lot of my earlier games I've created were tested on these just to make sure that they could basically run on any kind of old desktop, which was no issue at all. I don't think i've ever written a game that would challenge any computer from the last 20 years specs, in all honesty, so I'm not surprised. Not sure if you can run proper compiled game maker created games on old computers but, if you can, I'd bet money that mine would still be full speed with no issues.

Computers have been so powerful for so long now, that I really can't see how they've stayed so expensive, and why people are taking the upgrade path so often. Business-wise, it makes sense for them to always be working on the new shiny, I guess, as that's where the money comes in, but i'm betting half the modern games could be coded to work on lot lower specs than they actually do.

Coders are basically getting lazy and just bloat out their stuff with lots of code that never gets used, rather than just strip out the bits they need, because there's so much HD space now, that it just doesn't matter. And you can't buy that latest whizz bang game with the huge hardware requirements unless you buy the kit to let you run it. Whizz bang game could probably have been developed tighter to not need such demanding hardware but I bet the hardware guys make deals with them to make it use their kit, though, so the consumer ends up paying out to both of them.

Quote from: Xerra on March 03, 2024, 21:08:15Computers have been so powerful for so long now, that I really can't see how they've stayed so expensive, and why people are taking the upgrade path so often. Business-wise, it makes sense for them to always be working on the new shiny, I guess, as that's where the money comes in, but i'm betting half the modern games could be coded to work on lot lower specs than they actually do.

..you will be surprised how many hardware from 80's is still working inside industrial systems that im dealing with..all 8-bit stuff..and guess what? works just fine and reliable for past few decades..