🚀 go-pugleaf

Charlton (char...@ihug.co.nz) wrote:
: All these 'required' and 'recommended' specifications really annoy me.  
: Unless I am totally mistaken, any program which will run on a pentium 
: will run on a 386 (am I correct in thinking that?)  Therefore the 
: 'required' system is basically a judgement call as to whether the 
: application will be fast enough.  When I bought Ultima 8, it said on the 
: box that a 486 was reccomended, I played it on a 386, and it was fine 
: albeit a little slow.

Usually you're right, but not always.  The 486 does have some machine
instructions that the 386 doesn't have, but they're pretty esoteric (e.g.
cache control instructions).  If a program actually calls one of these
instructions, a 386 would have no idea what to do and so the game would
most likely crash.  Similarly, the Pentium has machine instructions that a
486 doesn't have, and the same thing could happen if a Pentium-only game
was run on a 486.

And the difference between "recommended" and "required" is huge.  Required
means that the game absolutely will not run on any machine less powerful
than the one specified.  Recommended means the game will run the way it
was meant to run on the specified system, but will run with a performance
hit on lesser machines.  Of course there labels aren't always 100%
correct on some games, but it's a safe bet to just follow what the box says.
-- 
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