i have been having a certain curiosity for a few years. you can see instances of this in some of my old threads from a few years back:
(2014) CHALLENGE: Get Blockland to run on low specs(2015) [CHALLENGE] Run Blockland on extremely low specs (this one actually generated some pretty good responses)
the ultimate question that ive been having for a while is:
what is the absolute bare minimum hardware that blockland (including v0002 and the retail versions) can be run on (as in the game boots to the main menu and loads freebuild without crashing or throwing some fatal error)? im not looking for the game to be perfectly playable per se, hell i'd count it even if the game crashes when you go and try to put a single brick down.
over the past couple years ive gotten access to some toys (including a 20 year old pc and the ability to use new emulators such as
86box). here is what i have found:
- blockland v0002 and its derivatives (e.g. rtb v1.045) can run on
ridiculously old hardware. i managed to get v0002 running on an emulated i486dx2 (a cpu from 1992!), 3dfx voodoo2, and windows 95. you can see the results in the images below (click to expand):
- as for retail versions of blockland, i have managed to get v21 r2001 to run in the past on a machine with an 800mhz celeron, 512mb of ram, and a voodoo3. see below image:
please note: the below text gets quite technical on the details of running retail blockland on old stuff. it's fine if you don't understand most of thiswith retail blockland things get tricky:
* no retail version of blockland can run on windows 9x (95/98/me) as far as my testing has gone and according to statements from badspot. kernelex (an extension of the 9x kernel that allows for a few somewhat newer programs to run) doesnt work either so there isnt really a chance here.
* retail versions from v1 to v13 natively support windows 2000, later versions require the patching in of dll files in order for the game to run on 2k.
see a guide a wrote a couple of years back* blockland v21 versions later than r2001 require windows 7 at minimum as a different version of visual studio is used among other changes intended to protect against rce exploits
* every attempt i have made to run retail blockland under emulation has resulted in failure. i have tested cpus ranging from the 486 to the pentium 3 (using an 86box fork called pcbox that adds support for it) and i have also used windows 2000 as the os + a combination of blockland versions v1.03 and v13 however despite this i get the below error thrown at me every time.
investigation into event logs seems to suggest that either retail blockland is trying to use non-existent cpu instructions (maybe it requires mmx/sse?) or in the case where these instructions are present there are simply bugs in the 86box/pcbox emulators that cause bl to fail to load. as such if any of you somehow still happen to have old ass pc hardware lying around that would be preferable
Show Posts
