We are currently developing our next game that will run under win95/DX5.

So, I want to ask what resolution is more suitable (in terms of marketing): 640*480*256 colors or 800*600*16bit?

What if I choose 800*600*16bit? How many customers (%) with 640*480*256color displays wouldn't see the game?

Go for 800x600 16bit ... nowadays I think anyone who want to play games with his pc can use that resolution :p
For my soccer game I used the quite risky res of 1024x768 16bit and only a few complained about the resolution... but I wouldn't repeat this "experiment" in future :)

Here's a couple of pages showing statistics on internet browser settings which both give monitor resolution data:

http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.htm
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

I'm not saying they're 100% accurate, but I think it's a decent enough indication that 800x600x16 won't kill you.

I'd go for hi color. That is a HUGE increase in visual quality. It's like going from sixteen colors to 256 colors, remember how much of a difference that made? Not only that, it makes programming and drawing much easier.

Thank you very much for your posts!

But...
We are trying to make our system requirements as low as possible. So, these are the requirements our engine runs under pretty well:
- Pentium 100 Mhz
- 4 mb RAM
- 1 mb video card
- DX5

Having in view these requirements, what we have to do? Does making the 800*600 res as a default will make these requirements just a waste of our time? Does the 800*600 res will make them not so necessary?

Why aim for a so low config?
You think a person with such pc is willing to spend money on a game? think about that... ppl who pay for games usually have new pcs... ;) if he can't spend 800$ to get a 2nd hand P3 pc, he for sure won't spend even 15$ for a game... IMHO

Opinions aside, its a simple fact that if you aim too low for your target PC you're going to hurt sales and/or popularity, not help them. You should defintely up your ante to a P2/300 or so, and barring some sort of extravagant 3D graphics or particuarly bad coding techniques, any P2/300 can handle a game running in 800x600 16 bit just fine. :)

Remember you still want to be selling your game in 2-3 years time too; and not have it looking like a complete dinosaur!

Originally posted by Anthony Flack
Remember you still want to be selling your game in 2-3 years time too; and not have it looking like a complete dinosaur!

Unless your game is SimDino (TM) (R) (DMCA) (CHOCOLATE) (c)(c)!

I am thinking of automatically changing settings to make the game run the nicest, and run at all. I have lots of adjustable settings which affect performance allready, however they are hidden from the user.

Maybe do a couple of seconds test
to see how performance is then lower certain settings until decent performance is reached. Saving these settings for later.


Have fun!

1. What about 640*480*16 bit? :)

1. There is no way you will be able to use 800*600 *16bit with this CPU, RAM and video with decent speed and gfx. Know ASM good enough? :)

2. If your game is not 3d (and it is not), your 2d graphics will not loose anything in 8bit. Try to convert your images into 256 colors - you'll see no difference.

3. If you aim at win95 then aim at DX3 :)

4. The game we are developing at the moment uses DX3, 640*480*16 bit (a side-scroller). All images are kept in 256 colors.

5. You may add a number of cool-looking 2d effects playing with pallete in 8bit mode.

And again: What about 640*480*16 bit? :) IMHO the standard resolution...

I'm using 800x600x16 in my game, targeting 400 mhz computers as the minimum, but expecting that users will have faster ones by now. Using SDL, so that's DirectX 5. I don't see any reason why you should use a lower resolution or bit depth (or DX version) at this point. The last computer I had that used 640x480 as the main resolution was a 486/33 and that was 10 years ago :) (damn that makes me feel old). I wish more people had 3D hardware though, so I could use hardware acceleration for effects. :)

If your game is not 3d (and it is not), your 2d graphics will not loose anything in 8bit. Try to convert your images into 256 colors - you'll see no difference.

How can you possibly know this?

You can do that if you have a separate palette for each image. So each image would have a max of 256 colors, but you're running in 16-bit color. You need some sort of lookup table to get an RGB color value for each of the image's colors. My brain isn't working right now sorry.. But I think this is how StarCraft and Diablo manage to have so many colors. I don't think this is really necessary these days though (StarCraft was made in '97) unless you're planning to have as much graphics as Diablo 2 had. :)

I think it's a very juicy tempting thing to store graphics in 256 colours with their own palette, and in system memory...

Lots of storage for great animation, you can apply different palettes for variety, and the only vidmem you need is for the screen buffers.

That's a nice idea, since you save lot of disk space too (smaller download size).
For USM I reduced all single buttons, windows, texts, etc to 256 or even 128-64 colors each one, in a way that they don't loose much quality: size passed to over 6-7mb to 2mb.
Got lot of comments on how I managed to put so much graphics into such a small downloadable file... that's the answer :P

On the 3 year old PC (IIRC) here, I wouldn't want to run a 3D game at more than 640x480x16. A 2D game might be ok in 800x600x16 if it doesn't redraw the whole screen all the time...

If it's a 3d game, though, you can run it at any resolution you like.

Will you still be using this 3 year old computer (sounds older than that), 3 years from now?

No, no, no way!

They claimed their engine runs pretty well on Pentium 100 with 4 mb ram and 1 mb video. Normal Win95 wohn't run on such a configuration. That means no dx, no 2d acceleration. And 800*600*16 would be extremely slow. Welcome to the mode 13h and ASM :)
I wonder why would anyone program this configuration. Nostalgy?

Serg, normal Win95 is a bit slow but fully usable a 486DX66 with 32MB RAM. I used to run it on such a computer.

Originally posted by Lipry

So, these are the requirements our engine runs under pretty well:
- Pentium 100 Mhz
- 4 mb RAM
- 1 mb video card
- DX5


;)
I guess it's not enough for win95, it reqiured 16mb of ram, but definitely not 4 mb. And is it possible to have 800*600*16 bit on 1mb video card? Anyway, it smells like sado-mazo hardcore k00l coding techniques :)

Originally posted by Serg Nechaeff
;)
I guess it's not enough for win95, it reqiured 16mb of ram, but definitely not 4 mb. And is it possible to have 800*600*16 bit on 1mb video card? Anyway, it smells like sado-mazo hardcore k00l coding techniques :)

I had first installed Win95 on what I had when it came out -- a 486/33 with 8 megs of RAM, 1 meg VRAM. It was slow, but it did run. I used 640x480 resolution though, don't remember color depth. And that computer was able to run Doom 2! Ahh.. those were the days. :)

I have to agree though - 4Mb RAM? The amount of people with 4Mb of ram these days must surely be around 0.0001% or thereabouts. Why knock yourself out trying to achieve this? Better to push the hardware a little further and make something that doesn't look hopelessly outdated to the other 99.9999% of people.

Thank you guys for your opinions!