Latest Angband Nighty build

[Malak Darkhunter]

I have windows Vista, trying the newest Nightly build for Angband, I like playing in full Ascii, however with the no graphics options checked I have no walls, anybody know for a fix for this?

[EpicMan]

There's a thread about this: http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=4733. It's caused by a difference in how Windows Vista/7 (and probably Server 2008) display the higher ASCII codes.

[Malak Darkhunter]

I can't get into the font files, I get an error message. I hate Vista, I do remember a vista font fix somewhere though.

[Malak Darkhunter]

I think I will just use the graphics for now, it works reasonably until i get a chance to ditch this vista laptop and pick up windows 7, or maybe reformatt it for windows xp.

[Magnate]

I think I will just use the graphics for now, it works reasonably until i get a chance to ditch this vista laptop and pick up windows 7, or maybe reformatt it for windows xp.

I highly recommend the latter. My wife's laptop is reasonably new and still Win 7 is dog slow. In fact I've never yet seen Win7 run fast on any machine.

[Timo Pietilä]

I highly recommend the latter. My wife's laptop is reasonably new and still Win 7 is dog slow. In fact I've never yet seen Win7 run fast on any machine.

I have. Faster than XP. Win7 requires memory. If you have enough memory in the machine and multi-core processor Win7 can be quite a bit faster than XP. I recommend 64bit Win7 for new computers.

[Magnate]

I have. Faster than XP. Win7 requires memory. If you have enough memory in the machine and multi-core processor Win7 can be quite a bit faster than XP. I recommend 64bit Win7 for new computers.

Interesting. I presume it needs more than 2GB then?

I had forgotten the multi-core thing (most of my machines are still using single-core CPUs). I expect you're right that Win7 makes much better use of multiple cores.

[Malak Darkhunter]

You can throw 8GB of memory at windows 7, you can have double the memory that you used to have with xp, vista. But you kind of need it because it takes a lot more memory just for the win 7 platform just to run.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Amazingly the fix that seany c suggested worked here as well. All I had to do was rename the pref-font-win folder to font-winx to disable it and it worked perfectly, now I got walls.

[Seany C]

If I'm not careful, I may get a (throroughly undeserved) reputation as a technosavant....

[Timo Pietilä]

Interesting. I presume it needs more than 2GB then?

I had forgotten the multi-core thing (most of my machines are still using single-core CPUs). I expect you're right that Win7 makes much better use of multiple cores.

2GB is pretty much minimum for decent usage. It starts with less, but can't really use leftover memory well enough that code speed difference comes visible.

It also depends of what you load in with every startup of the computer and which theme you use. Now that I think of it I have seen insanely fast XP that no Win 7 that I have seen can beat, but it was started with diagnostic startup so that only bare minimum of drivers and processes got loaded (OTOH I have not done same with Win7). That's fast on modern computers. But in real-life situation when your computer is not empty and loads all kinds of stuff in memory before you can even start to use it Win 7 can be faster than XP.

This is getting a bit too OT for this forum, but if you buy a computer in next year or so use a (large) SSD as systemdisk. It makes huge difference in computer startup speed.