iPad first gen.
jKendan
Member Posts: 25
Hi everyone, will it work on iPad first generation?
Thanks
Thanks
Post edited by jKendan on
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Comments
-Trent
Games from EA and Firaxis run fine on the iPad2 but experience a host of issues on the original iPad. It's pessimistic, but I can't see how Overhaul is going to be any different.
I'm not saying this out of spite, but from experience. If you browse the App store, you'll see scores of big games that do not run well on the original iPad. That's not, strictly speaking the developer's fault. They have only so many man hours to devote to optimization, after all.
It includes new art, new sound, and large portions of the codebase have been reworked. This thing is weighing in at 3 gigs, which is a *huge* footprint on a tablet. (Even the patchd GOG version is something like 2 gigs.)
Look at it this way: Would you expect a game released in 2012 to run well on old (arbitrarily, let's say 2008) hardware? Same kind of idea.
The original iPad has a single core CPU, half the RAM, and an older version of the OS. Why would anyone expect a big, brand new spanking game to run flawlessly on it?
Seriously trying not to be a downer here -- just suggesting people temper their expectations.
Despite Overhaul's good intentions, I don't expect them to spend much development time optimizing their product for a platform which is, more or less, outdated.
166 MHz CPU, 16 MB RAM, 2 MB video card RAM, 4X CD-ROM drive, DirectX 5.0, 300 MB available hard disk space, Windows 95
And BG2 specs from Wikipedia:
233 MHz Pentium II (or compatible) CPU, 32 MB RAM, 4 MB DirectX-certified video card, DirectX-certified sound card, 4x CD-ROM drive, DirectX 7.0, 750 MB available hard disk space, Windows 95, Keyboard, mouse
Those are minimums. BG2 probably recommended 64MB RAM. Those processors where single core back then. If the minimum for BG2 was 233MHz the recommended was probably in the 500MHz range.
The first gen iPad has 256MB RAM. An ARM processor is a very different beast from a Pentium---for one thing it's meant to run A LOT cooler and pull a lot less power. But still the original iPad is a 1GHz single core processor. And the video card is vastly superior to the 4MB minimum card on BG2.
If Trent says it's "working pretty good" on a first gen iPad, I'm tempted to believe him.
@jonmichaels I'll say it again: BGEE is not the original game. Posting Win95 specs from 1998 isn't relevant, and worse, makes no sense in this context.
All I'm suggesting is that everyone take broad responses like "Yep, should work fine" (see the very first response to the thread) with a very large grain of salt. Because from what I've seen in the App store, things like "working pretty good" can have very broad definitions.
Yes the new game has a fixed up code base. Yes the new game supports various modern compressed audio formats like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. However the added portion of the game (other than the new characters) are new areas that didn't exist in the original game. 1400 lines of new dialog for those new characters and new areas. New graphics and new score for those areas.
So I have to imagine that since it's based on the BG2 engine, we're still looking at something that can load a playable area into something in the range of 32MB of RAM. The original iPad has plenty of horsepower to handle the modest requirements of BG2. We also have Creative Director of the game saying it works. So I'm not understanding why you're insisting it doesn't.
Just flat out it won't look as nice on it as it will on the iPad mini, 2, 3 or 3.5, but, it works.
The biggest difference you'll notice is the zoom - on the other iPads, it uses a nice filtering algorithm that makes everything look pretty and smooth. The iPad 1 won't have that, just due to technical limitations.
Planned to buy the big one today but after holding the mini in the store, I really want that one. It was out of stock so I am still debating.
I think I like it as well, but no retina display is a deal breaker for me - I'm going to wait until the mini generation 2, myself.