Ren'Py on Windows 95

[mikey]

This may be a stupid question, but anyway:

Recently I looked at the Ren'Py download page and saw that you can make your games on Win98 and higher.

Is it correct that this means you can have the launcher and all the cool dev thingies on Windows 98and up only , but that it doesn't mean that actually created Ren'Py games don't run on Windows 95?

[denzil]

I gave it a try and it actually seemed to work well (in Virtual PC). Scite didn't work, it was missing a dll, but that would be probably easy to fix. So you can probably run RenPy games on Windows 95 as well as develop them there. I tried only RenPy 6.6.0, no idea about the other versions.

[PyTom]

Actually, I suspect that the minimum version of windows is probably something like Windows 95 OSR 2, or Windows 95 with winsock 2 installed.

That being said, at some point in the future I suspect the libraries I use will drop support for the 95-98-ME series, as they are very different from the 2000-XP-Vista line. (Note that 95 hasn't been supported by Microsoft for 6+ years, and 98/ME support was dropped over a year ago.)

At some point I will support, and maybe require, OpenGL with multitexturing, so that might also increase Ren'Py's hardware requirements. In general, I prefer to support 5-6 year old computers, but I'm not sure how much further back I need to go. (Since the further back I go, the less features I can take advantage of.)

[mikey]

Hmmm... I was wondering some time ago about a "Ren'Py Light", sort of a simple highly compatible no-frills version - no fancy transitions, just text, pictures and music support.

I don't know how attractive this thing would be though, probably not very much. I would love it, though.

[PyTom]

From my perspective, this probably won't help much. It's not the transitions that cause compatibility problems... it's stuff like using non-english characters in window titlebars. Well, it's also the fact that older systems have limited memory and CPU. But you can always just flip transitions off.

[Ivlivs]

OpenGL?! Please, do not make Ren'Py require all of that. It would not be able to run on my current computer at all if you do that.

[Wintermoon]

From my point of view, old computers aren't as much of an issue as emulators of the future (and possibly handheld computers and other alternative devices). Anecdote: I am a fan of the Quest for Glory series. The first four games in the series run under DOS. I can play all of them without any problem on modern computers using DOSBox. The fifth game in the series runs under Windows and requires an archaic version of Quicktime, and possibly some form of 3D acceleration. I haven't been able to run it at all the last time I tried, with or without emulator.

The moral of the story: if you can't be forward-compatible, you can sometimes achieve the same effect by being backwards-compatible. That most computer now support system X doesn't mean that most computers in the future will support system X.

(OpenGL, however, should be mostly safe as far as the future is concerned. DirectX, on the other hand, is hopeless. I predict that computers ten years from now will still support OpenGL 1.0 but not DirectX 10, even though the former is more than a decade older than the latter. Unfortunately, right now my qemu emulator does not support 3D acceleration at all.)

[PyTom]

OpenGL?! Please, do not make Ren'Py require all of that. It would not be able to run on my current computer at all if you do that.

Really? I was under the impression that most computers made since 2000 supported OpenGL. What are you running that doesn't support it? I plan to be very lightweight on what I require OpenGl-wise (probably a 1.1 card with the multitexture extension), but even that should allow for a bunch of things we can't do now (like distorting images), while also making some of the things we do now easier/faster.

[Wintermoon]

IIRC the Vista drivers for ATI cards shipped without OpenGL support, and intel integrated graphics chips have always had problems with OpenGL. OpenGL driver support under Linux has also been problematic in the past.

[Ivlivs]

Could there be an option to turn off OpenGL support?

[PyTom]

Wintermoon >>> Yes, but Vista will emulate OpenGL with DirectX if it's not supported. So while you might not have the highest-performance OpengGL, it should still be much faster than the OpenGL in the 8-year-old systems I plan to support.

Right now, I think Ren'Py is reaching the limits of what we can do with the pure software model. I've seen a number of Japanese games (like Tsukihime and the MuvLuv engine demo) that have been doing more interesting things using 3D hardware, and I want to conservatively begin to take Ren'Py in that direction.

Ivlivs >>> Eventually, I'd like to make Ren'Py OpenGL based. There might be an interim period in which a non-OpenGL mode is supported.

One thing people could do to help would be to download glinfo, run it, go to "Reports", save the report as html, and attach the report to a post here. I'd especially be interested in people with old/weird hardware.

[Jake]

Here's my desktop, for what it's worth. Although I know that's fairly capable of running OpenGL...

I was going to submit a report for my old tablet PC, which IIRC had an Intel graphics chipset and I know ran my current OpenGL-based project fine last time I checked... but I can't find it. I can find the power cable, but annoyingly not the laptop. Which is pretty weird...
(The best bit is that I distinctly remember putting it somewhere and thinking to myself "There's no way I'll forget where this is, this is too weird a place to leave a laptop"...)

[Wintermoon]

Included is the report for my Windows machine - no longer new, but fairly capable with updated drivers. I would be more interested in my Mac (original Mac Mini, limited OpenGL support). I already know my Linux computer (virtual machine through qemu, running on my Windows machine) has a purely software OpenGL implementation, which is unusably slow.

[PyTom]

At some point I'll probably try to throw together a tool that can run on the mac and linux to do the opengl test. But I'd expect even limited opengl to be enough... I'm targeting my mac G3 after all.

(Linux is a problem, and I'm not sure how I'll deal with it.)

[DaFool]

My work computer.