On Sunday 01 September 2002 00:45, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I'm not saying that all new soft should be developped for Turbo-R with 1MB > RAM and hard disk. But just to place in a reasonable mid term: it still > seem a sort of "sin" to develop programs with somewhat high hardware or > just memory requirements. But most tims this makes impossible to develop > good programs.
I guess MSX developers do not like the attitude some (not all) PC developers have, of skipping optimisation and let the powerful hardware compensate for sloppy software. On the other hand, if higher system requirements are necessary to build a program at all, or will save months of development time, it is better to release it with higher requirements. I think the translated Snatcher is a good example. Daniel optimised it enough to run on 128K from floppy. However for running it on harddisk you need 256K, because making it run from harddisk on 128K would be a huge effort. Actually, I don't think there are many people whose MSX has a harddisk but no more than 128K of memory. > So, what is my proposal? To set the current "MSX minimal standard" to MSX2 > with DOS 2 and 256K RAM. Even requiring hard disk would not be a nonsense > for some applications. I don't think we really need such a standard. For each program the requirements are different: - For programs that dynamically allocate memory, use files that can be anywhere on the system etc DOS2 makes sense. However, a game which has fixed memory requirements and will save to a predefined location does not benefit much from DOS2. - Ofcourse any program that works with files over 720K (such as a movie player) needs a harddisk. But something like a text viewer does not need it, it would take no effort at all to make it work on floppy (which uses the same DOS2 calls). So it's a matter of finding the balance between "how much easier will development be" and "how many people will not be able to use my software".
