The Tavern

Hi.I am planning to buy a laptop for the sole use of reading books,and playing stone soup+dwarf fortress
can you recommend me a cheap one which has still enough power for running stone soup ascii smooth,and,if possible,dwarf fortress(ascii) too?
(optional)Aaand,it has two ethernet ports.
my budget is 300 to 400 bucks :l
I would be grateful for a fast reply.

Ps:ascii means non tile version

Stone Soup is simple enough that it should be able to be ran on a modern toaster.

well,its auto explore that concerns me most.i played on my dads old laptop(sempron)and quto explore was uber slow

Your autoexplore would probably run a lot faster if you took set the speed to -1, so it'll skip drawing the actual exploration and just draw stuff when you're finished exploring. You should try that on your dad's computer and then check if it's still slow.

I would guess that any machine that is even slightly capable of running DF would have no problems with Crawl.

I checked out chaosforge and the learndb but didnt find out how i can alter the auotexplore speed.would somebody be so kindly to point it out for me?:D

The entries for travel_delay and explore_delay are in the init.txt file in the Settings folder. Open the file with notepad, press ctrl-f to open the Find box, type travel_delay and press enter. The default entries for travel_delay and explore_delay are 20 and -1 respectively. To change, them, first delete the "#" at the beginning of the line, then change the number to your desired value.

Also, I had a problem with autoexplore being very slow on my laptop for a long time. What finally fixed the problem was changing the color depth setting in Windows' display properties from 16 bit to 32 bit. That was for tiles, though. I'm not sure if that's what you were playing on your dad's laptop. If not, that probably won't help you.

How old is your dad's laptop and, if you know them, what's its specs?

I don't know the system specs for dwarf fortress but DC:SS runs on a cold rock. You don't need high system specs for reading books and playing roguelikes.

If you played online ASCII, all you would need is to run PuTTY .

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF201 ... quirements

I have a crappy laptop that can only play DF on low settings and Crawl runs smoothly on it.

Yeah, the system requirements for DF are probably orders of magnitude higher than Crawl.

Opinions on what constitutes acceptable FPS for Dwarf Fortresss vary a lot depending upon how used to being spoiled with incredible processing power the players are, personally I started playing DF on a pretty old lap top a couple of versions ago, and was happy to have 40 FPS with a 3 x 3 embark, no river, 80 dwarves, rain and temp switched off. Now with the current DF2010, and my new laptop, I am happy at 40 FPS, a 4 x 4 embark, a river, 80 dwarves, rain and temp on.

If your laptop is really old, then you might want to play an older version of DF, like 31.08, or even 40d, which should be compatible with the nanofortress utility, which allows 1x1 embarks. Generate a small world, with a short (50 year) history, use a 1 x 1 embark, cap your pop at 50, kill all your cats, switch off rain and temp, be happy.

Whereas crawl, and particularly Putty, you can just play