This page contains some specific questions about Solar Kingdom and the hardware it will run on.
1. What hardware is required to run Solar Kingdom?
2. If I have a more powerful PC will I see the benefit?
3. Will Solar Kingdom make use of my 3D accelerator?
4. What's the best PC configuration?
5. What operating systems will Solar Kingdom run under?
6. How big is Solar Kingdom?
7. What about support for Solar Kingdom?
The basic specification is as follows:
Yes. As the speed of the PC rises so do Solar Kingdom's frame rates. As the amount of memory rises, frame rates and texture quality can also rise. The images in the simulator and encyclopedia are of a better quality with a 32-bit display.
Yes, provided that the accelerator can use acceleration in a window (all modern cards can do this). Some of the older cards cannot do this - Voodoo 2 being the most popular. Cards which can work in windowed mode include:
If your cards supports full screen anti-aliasing (FSAA) then turning it one can produce even nicer results making everything smoother. I can affect the stars though - they become fuzzy.
Solar Kingdom does not require a 3D accelerator.
Solar Kingdom was developed on a PII-350 PC with a Voodoo 3-2000 and it works very well with that configuration. A PC less than 3 years old has plenty of power. One issue which can affect all PCs is insufficient memory. In general your PC will run better with more memory (unless it has plenty).
Solar Kingdom will not run under Windows NT 4.0 (although the encyclopedia is still readable). Solar Kingdom requires that DirectX 6.1 or above is installed. You can get the latest DirectX directly from Microsoft here.
The full CD is 360MB (after compression). The simulator is about 130MB and the encyclopedia 290MB. The full installed size therefore is about 420MB.
Support is provided by e-mail.