User avatar
oldbull

Posted Wed Feb 27, 2019 10:33 pm

If it's not a ridiculous amount of work, it would be nice to add system requirements to the game library descriptions. I'm still a novice and can easily see myself trying to run an AGA game or a 1MB chip game on my A1000 because the game descriptions don't tell me when my hardware does not meet the specs.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu Feb 28, 2019 9:35 am

I've thought about that before. The idea was to add section to the info box below "Release Date". But it was going to be hard to standardize and keep tidy. So then I thought it could be its own box of sorts, and it would be cobbled together through a series of what's printed on the outside of game boxes and/or trial and error performed during the review. But then you run into the whole "What if it's PAL only? Or what if you reviewed an NTSC version and supplied NTSC ADFs, but the reader is on a PAL machine?" then eventually "What if you need to disable Fast RAM?" etc.

As every Amigan knows, compatibility can be a major PITA for a lot of folks on classic hardware.

So at some point during the Game Library development I started to include Technical Notes at the end of each review. I'll mention what I had to do to get a game running, or what I was using when I played the game (which is not an exhaustive list by any stretch and would be really hard for me to complete on my own). Add to the mix in the early days I was using Amiga Forever on a PC, which auto-configures itself to try and just run when you launch an ADF, and sometimes it picks PAL when it doesn't need to, etc.

PANG is a good example of how I started to address this issue early on. But it's in the main copy, not the info box, because it can be painfully complicated sometimes. "Use a stock machine on any OS - but not AGA hardware - and it was designed for PAL" etc.

But, at the lowest level, it could be some sort of "System Recs" as originally identified by the publisher on the game box. Or something.

To that end, development on this site - when it comes to updating the database and whatnot - has slowed quite a bit. I used to work with a guy from Poland who helped me build it back in 2016. But after a year he bowed out and I'm mostly stuck with front-end updates. I do have one more dev resource, but I have to pick and choose when I use that one pretty carefully (he's my boss). He likes to help out when he can, but he's also an insanely busy guy.

I'll put your suggestion in a note, though, and hang onto it. I'll have to go back eventually and re-play and re-review many of the early entries so 1) they are actual reviews with substance and 2) include those kinds of details.





Return to “Games”