Moonstone

[beanheadmcginty]

GOG.com have just emailed me to tell me that one of my favourite games on the Amiga, Moonstone, is now available for sale on their site for a surprisingly pricey €5.99 (https://www.gog.com/game/moonstone_a_hard_days_knight) . I have no intention of buying it because it's probably not held up all that well and I'm no longer 11, but what amazed me are the system requirements. This came on 3 (pirated) floppies and ran perfectly fine on my 1mb Amiga 600 (except when it crashed if the dragon had the moonstone in its inventory). Yet according to GOG, this game is 24mb in size and the minimum PC system requirements are:

Processor: 1.8 GHz
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Graphics: 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended)
Storage: 1GB available space

What the fuck's going on here? Are they having to emulate the Amiga to get it to run? Is that still difficult for a PC to do?

[Zetetic]

Running in DOSBox, it says. In a virtual machine, but not a virtual Amiga.

It'll probably run fine on something far below those requirements, if you can get it running on a horrendously insecure, crash prone ancient OS like Windows 98.

(The thing packed into DOSBox would run on whatever the original DOS version ran on, presumably.)

[Mister Six]

Wayhey, Moonstone! Loved how gruesome it was. I had no idea what I was doing, but I loved it.

As for the bigger size, maybe that or maybe it's just that PC coding is more complex. Or that there's no pressure to code elegantly and carefully to keep the filesize down.

[Zetetic]

What the fuck's going on here?

Better to list something slightly higher but essentially trivial for anything that will actual run Windows 7 in the first place, than underestimate the overhead.

[MojoJojo]

GOG.com have just emailed me to tell me that one of my favourite games on the Amiga, Moonstone, is now available for sale on their site for a surprisingly pricey €5.99 (https://www.gog.com/game/moonstone_a_hard_days_knight) . I have no intention of buying it because it's probably not held up all that well and I'm no longer 11, but what amazed me are the system requirements. This came on 3 (pirated) floppies and ran perfectly fine on my 1mb Amiga 600 (except when it crashed if the dragon had the moonstone in its inventory). Yet according to GOG, this game is 24mb in size and the minimum PC system requirements are:

Processor: 1.8 GHz
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Graphics: 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended)
Storage: 1GB available space

What the fuck's going on here? Are they having to emulate the Amiga to get it to run? Is that still difficult for a PC to do?

Most likely, that's the lowest spec system they have to test on (+ what Zetetic said). A common principle in software testing is "if you haven't tested it, it doesn't work" , so while it probably runs fine on a older machine, they haven't gone to a museum to find out.