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Starcraft 1 CPU requirements

B

borisvodofsky

Diamond Member
I used my 3.0ghz opteron 185 s939 to play a game of starcraft just now, friends over.

I let the guests use my better computers.

3v3 zero clutter, this CPU actually got bogged down during big battle with carriers. 😱

Game from 1998 couldn't be tamed by a 2006 CPU 😱
 
I played through the single player campaign a while back on my netbook (900 mhz celeron m from back in the day) with zero issues. I always build up fleets of carriers too but the battles probably weren't as big as they would be in a 3v3...
 
multiplayer is a totally different issue. I used to play total annihilation(came out around the same time), and it also had trouble when unit count got high, even on higher powered systems. The pathfinding would get screwed up too. Anywhoo, I don't think there's anything wrong with your system, it's just the way these older rts games are.

edit: in other words, it'd probably run slow on a 2500k too
 
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wow really. i remember installing starcraft 1 on my computer at the time the day it came out.

had a p100 with 24mb of ram, and no L2 cache. single player was ok, but it'd bog down whenever more than maybe 15-20 units got on screen. upgraded to a k6-200 a few months later and I remember having lan parties, when the peopel with the best computers had p2-266s or so and at least at the time it didnt feel very bogged down.

strange.
 
I played star craft, starcraft brood wars and diablo 2 single player and online on a pentium 3 700mhz 128mb ram back in 2001 and they ran great.

last I played starcraft was on a amd x2 64 5600+ 2.8ghz and it good but big online battle seem to lag but the cpu never maxed so my guess was the server was bogging.
 
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nonameo said:
I used to play total annihilation(came out around the same time), and it also had trouble when unit count got high, even on higher powered systems
Click to expand...

Total Annihilation's AI proficiency directly scales with CPU power. The last time I tried to play it, I ended up frustrated and put the AI on a slow atom netbook so that it didn't destroy us too easily.
 
There were a couple custom maps in WC3 that I'm sure would bog down a 3770k @ 5GHz. I'm sure SC1 is the same way since it is basically the same engine. On a custom map you can do whatever you want. I had this 8v8 map with super fast spawn times and unlimited units (this limit is called "food" in WC3). You could literally build 100 barracks and they could all spawn footies @ 1 per second so in a matter of seconds the whole screen is filled and the game will actually lock up completely within about a minute.
 
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AFAIK zero Clutter has the Map limit. Infamous SC1 issue in 3v3 or 4v4 battles, when you could not build anymore units or buildings.

However I used to play such money maps very often and I can say I was very good. No issues on a Pentium 4 2.6 GHZ.
 
borisvodofsky said:
I used my 3.0ghz opteron 185 s939 to play a game of starcraft just now, friends over.

I let the guests use my better computers.

3v3 zero clutter, this CPU actually got bogged down during big battle with carriers. 😱

Game from 1998 couldn't be tamed by a 2006 CPU 😱
Click to expand...

I run Starcraft 1 on a P3-500 machine w/128 MB RAM with no problem on large 4x4 maps, so it is not a CPU problem, really.

With OS are you using? The graphic card driver are correctly installed? Sorry for the very "dumb" questions, but it is very strange that you have problem with an Opteron CPU.

nonameo said:
multiplayer is a totally different issue. I used to play total annihilation(came out around the same time), and it also had trouble when unit count got high, even on higher powered systems. The pathfinding would get screwed up too. Anywhoo, I don't think there's anything wrong with your system, it's just the way these older rts games are.

edit: in other words, it'd probably run slow on a 2500k too
Click to expand...

TA is a different story: it used polygons for both terrain and units; moreover, as far I remember, it has no unit limits.

Starcraft, on the other side, use simple bitmaps and it has a quite low unit limit (200 units at max). So, it really should be fast on that hardware...

Thanks.
 
kernelc said:
I run Starcraft 1 on a P3-500 machine w/128 MB RAM with no problem on large 4x4 maps, so it is not a CPU problem, really.

With OS are you using? The graphic card driver are correctly installed? Sorry for the very "dumb" questions, but it is very strange that you have problem with an Opteron CPU.



TA is a different story: it used polygons for both terrain and units; moreover, as far I remember, it has no unit limits.

Starcraft, on the other side, use simple bitmaps and it has a quite low unit limit (200 units at max). So, it really should be fast on that hardware...

Thanks.
Click to expand...

^ This. Used to play 8 player maps on LAN on Pentium 166 MMXs without lag.

If I remember correctly, SC1 only required a Pentium 90Mhz. Anything modern should handle it without breaking a sweat.
 
ShadowVVL said:
I played star craft, starcraft brood wars and diablo 2 single player and online on a pentium 3 700mhz 128mb ram back in 2001 and they ran great.

last I played starcraft was on a amd x2 64 5600+ 2.8ghz and it good but big online battle seem to lag but the cpu never maxed so my guess was the server was bogging.
Click to expand...

I was on lan, and a guy brought over his custom linux-router lan box with a dedicated 4ghz pentium 4. :sneaky:

^^^ I was so jelly, because I have a 4ghz pentium 4, i just don't want to spend $200 on lan cards.
 
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sm625 said:
There were a couple custom maps in WC3 that I'm sure would bog down a 3770k @ 5GHz. I'm sure SC1 is the same way since it is basically the same engine. On a custom map you can do whatever you want. I had this 8v8 map with super fast spawn times and unlimited units (this limit is called "food" in WC3). You could literally build 100 barracks and they could all spawn footies @ 1 per second so in a matter of seconds the whole screen is filled and the game will actually lock up completely within about a minute.
Click to expand...

LOL, so how did you play this map if it locked up a minute into the game? 😀
 
Bateluer said:
^ This. Used to play 8 player maps on LAN on Pentium 166 MMXs without lag.

If I remember correctly, SC1 only required a Pentium 90Mhz. Anything modern should handle it without breaking a sweat.
Click to expand...

....i had an atom 1.6 ghz choke on starcraft 1.

in single player.
 
Silly thread stating the obvious common sense. Go open those fish tank web pages with GPU-acceleration disabled (old browsers might be convenient). Increase the number of fish and see the performance tanks.
 
Its the game engine and not your CPU. Theres nothing you can do about it hardware wise, it all comes down to the coding of the game. There are other RTS's that suffer from the same problem, namely Age of Empires 2. There is a 1000 population limit hack for that game, and even on a 5ghz 2500k the game slows to a crawl on a 3v3 game with 6000 units running around. The engines for these games were just never designed with that much stuff in mind and only redoing the code could fix it [gl on getting the code though!].
 
btw just installed Starcraft 1 on windows 8 and it works perfectly, no color fix is necessary as in win7, sound works flawlessly and scrolling is no longer too fast.
 
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Bateluer said:
^ This. Used to play 8 player maps on LAN on Pentium 166 MMXs without lag.

If I remember correctly, SC1 only required a Pentium 90Mhz. Anything modern should handle it without breaking a sweat.
Click to expand...

While the minimum was a pentium 90, that doesnt mean anything about 4v4 matches. I played on a 200 Mhz Pentium and even 2v2 on money maps started to lag pretty quickly, way before you were maxed or map limit was reached. AFAIk even pentium 2 had issues. Just think 4v4 with carriers and lings...
 
borisvodofsky said:
Really? that's good news, I have the registry hacks backed up if anyone needs the Windows 7 Starcraft color fix. 😀:thumbsup:
Click to expand...
StarCraft is one game... that has seen official updates for nearly a decade. Of course, it won't have troubles running on a modern OS / hardware.
 
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