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After seeing the screenshots of that Tron light-cycle program on the DarkBASIC web site I immediately got a copy of DarkBASIC with DarkMATTER for £20, even though I didn't have a PC to run it on yet!

Now I'm considering one of two PC systems, both based around an Athlon XP 2200+, nForce2 motherboard, 256MB RAM and Windows 2000 Pro, for under £800. One has a GeForce 4 MX 440 SE AGP 8X card, the other has a more powerful ATI Radeon 9200.

Given a choice between the two I'd rather have the one with the ATI card, but I've heard from somewhere that DarkBASIC might have problems working with an ATI card under Windows 2000.

It's just that I'd rather use Windows 2000 as Windows XP requires double the memory that Windows 2000 requires to work properly. This would mean that getting Windows XP involves getting a more expensive system, which in turn means waiting even longer before finally getting a PC to run DB Classic!

So any help on this would be great!

whatever you do, i would NEVER get windows 2000, it can seriously screw up when trying to play games, even more than XP does!

if you mean windows ME, then I know it will work with that. I've never heard of problems with ATI Radeon cards and db, but i dont know for sure

BTW,
good choice of parts, definetly go for the AMD Athlon XP 2200+ and radeon card, they're great
if you have a little extra money, the 2400+ isn't a lot dearer, and is a bit faster (obviously )

I've recently been in contact with the author of StarWraith 3. From his research he found that DB 1.13e Classic works just fine with Windows 2000 and ATI Radeons. As he uses DB 1.13e Classic exclusively to produce games like SW3 and uses a wide variety of platforms to test his stuff on, I guess he knows what he's talking about.

The stability issues Sicjoshsic mentioned probably have more to do with DBPro than DB 1.13e Classic. SW3 guy had them when he tried out development with DBPro. They went away when he carried on with DB 1.13 Classic.

Any further comments?

By the way, so far as running games in general with Windows 2000 is concerned, Sicjoshsic is probably right.

While I'm happy to develop and run DB Classic games on a PC, I'm not really interested in running commercial games on a PC. The reason is that you pretty much have to upgrade your PC every time you buy a new game, which is way too expensive!

I'd rather run commercial games on a console like a Playstation 2 or XBox. That way I can build up a sizeable collection of games before the time comes to upgrade to a new machine.

@ out there dude

for one, if windows xp takes up twice as much memory as 2000, which im not even sure that it will, just but some more memory. its usually pretty cheap. like i got my stick of 256 ddr unbuffered for $40. but you have to know if the memory you purchase coresponds w/ your motherboard.

i run windows 2000, and the only problems ive ever had was that i just had this w32.pinfi virus on my pc, and i had to format my hd to get rid of it. and also, to play worms armageddon on wormnet (stfu guys hahah) i had to dl a patch specifically for win2k.

but thats it, and ive seen for myself that win2k runs very nicely. once my dad said that in the school district, for the board members and such they got winME and it suxored. lol. he runs win2k at work...

max

Windows 2000 needs 64MB of working memory. A reasonable amount of memory for running applications as well is 256MB, which is why I chose that amount.

Windows XP can work with as little as 64MB of working memory, but in practice it recommends, and thus requires, 128MB of working memory.

I've tried Windows XP using a friend's system with 256MB of RAM. It slows down to a crawl when you do something as simple as open up an explorer window while running an application. So it needs at least 512MB to work properly with applications.

The memory alone might be cheap to get but I'm interested in the system as a whole in terms of all the system components balancing each other out.

This is the specification for the Windows 2000 system previously mentioned:

AMD Athlon XP 2200+ processor
nForce2 motherboard
256MB 266MHz DDR SDRAM (using 2 x 128MB DIMMs)
DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives
40GB Ultra-DMA 7200rpm hard drive
1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive
64MB ATI Radeon 9200 AGP 8X graphics card
17" FST 1152 x 864 @ 75Hz colour monitor
etc.

And this is the upgraded specification I personally feel would be required to work with Windows XP:

AMD Athlon XP 2200+ processor
nForce2 motherboard
512MB 266MHz DDR SDRAM (using 2x256MB DIMMs)
DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives
80GB Ultra-DMA 7200rpm hard drive
1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive
128MB ATI Radeon 9200 AGP 8X graphics card
19" FST 1600 x 1200 @ 75Hz colour monitor
etc.

So you see why I would feel that I would have to go for a significantly more expensive system to be comfortable with Windows XP? This would in turn mean waiting several more months before I can finally have a system to run my copy of DarkBASIC.