Anyone Ever Tried XI On An Sbc?

I was considering putting together a SBC or some other mini computer as a little FFXI rig. Has anyone tried this? I was thinking about an ODROID-H2+. Can snag one for 120 before ram,and can get a couple laptop sticks dirt cheap on Newegg or eBay, but wondered if anyone’s tried this and had any opinions.

I'm not sure if you can run FFXI on a small block chevy or not. I'd be interested to see results :-P

As long as you're running windows, shouldn't be an issue. Hopefully you won't run into display driver issues tho, I know it's very hit/miss with those. I've personally never had an issue, but I've read plenty of posts with people who have.

I think it heavily depends on how much extra stuff you want to run alongside FFXI.

FFXI itself was designed to run on a PS2, so I really dont expect vanilla FFXI to bump into much for hardware limitations on some of the nicer SBCs, just double check the min hardware requirements on official site really.

What Im curious about is the why part, is it just for kicks or do you have some kind of goal in mind?

Well the board I mentioned runs off the CPU’s UHD 600, which is on a lot of laptops out there so I don’t think getting drivers will be an issue. Now I haven’t run XI on integrated graphics in a long time (last two laptops had a 960m and a RX580) but it should be able to do ok.

Well I currently have a big rig, but if I try to do anything else on it while playing Windower!XI, XI just loves to crash. I have a second monitor handy and very little room, so thought I could give the SBC route a shot as a near-dedicated XI rig without taking up space with a second computer. And my laptop is a serious heat hog, which is why I’m getting away from that for XI.

That sounds like more of the problem to me, your game shouldnt be crashing when you do other stuff on your computer, the whole point of Windower is to fix that.

Have you tried getting help on the windower forums?

Oddly it actually looks like windower. Trying an experiment with just vanilla at the moment. Two things that end up usually crashing me are switching inputs or turning off the TV, or loading something else that renders 3D. tried both and no crashes so far. It's looking more and more like Windower. Will have to check the windower forums. Just weird.

To me it would depend on if you want/need the form factor, or if it's more the cost that you're considering. You'd likely get far better performance out of a refurb business desktop with a discrete card in it.

Have you dropped down UAC settings? I know multiboxing runs into issues with that, so maybe other things like you've mentioned do too.

Dgvoodoo stops quite a bit of crashing related to the monitor changes you mentioned.

Are you currently using this?

Anything that causes my resolution to change causes FFXI to crash, without fail for me. Ive never found something that fixed this.

That issue dates way back the the very first days of windower, and I've never had a point in time where it wasn't an issue.

Configuring your desktop setup so screens dont change when you change monitor inputs prevents this (IE by making sure Monitor 1 is still Monitor 1 in all possible configurations)

Litmus test is simple, if you get that thing where the screen goes black for a second, then comes back, it'll crash FFXI.

Also, weirdly Git Tools seems to crash FFXI for me, so I have to use git manually via the command line.

If you change resolution of a monitor and it flickers everything and you get that "Keep changes" screen? That crashes it too.

Basically anything involving resolutions/screens config will break it. I dunno if there's a workaround, it's just how FFXI is as an ancient piece of software. It was originally not designed for non-full screen play and came out in a time when multi-screen play was not the norm.

What specific software is crashing on your PC? Would it be possible to do it the other way around and run that software on a different machine, or use an alternative?

Im surprised at the inputs breaking things though, like are we talking about switching from Keyboard<->Controller or something?

Couple things: just don't, especially if it's running intel HD graphics, intel's drivers suck for XI.

You can prevent "disconnect" crashing by virtualizing your gpu, with say dgvoodoo (can lock pc, disconnect monitors, etc).

All that said, you could probably get the game to work on just about anything running x86 based windows and has the space for it at this point, direct3d acceleration is easily achieve, however playing at a decent (stable) framerate with visual effects at any decent resolution (something the game wasn't designed with mind you) isn't something you'll probably get with an integrated gpu, regardless of what system it is in.

You'd be better off getting a used business pc, sff that takes a half height card, which you could get in bulk. Could potentially even get away with something running an apu, but I'd avoid intel entirely unless you can find a verified instance of the exact model igpu working with XI (I believe some of the older ones had driver updates for proper compatibility, but unknown at what resolution).

Just verified that dgVoodoo2 fixes this. It has to do with FFXI getting a resolution different then what it expects and then throwing an exception. dgVoodoo2 abstracts the display handling and graphics pipeline away from FFXI. This is why so many problems with old games are resolved by using dgVoodo2.

lolno

I play sometimes on a GPD Win 2, tiny computer. Runs alright. Domain Invasion is a slideshow, though.

For the price of a gpd win 2 you could build/buy a decent headless machine.
Then stream the machine anywhere in the house.
I did this before I used dgvoodoo to correct the crashing.

But if your internet is decent you can play from your phone on the go or anything that supports android apps(parsec) using this same method.

no, but definitely better than that.

and? there's a yuge difference between 720p at 20fps and 1080p. I also wouldn't make that bet, but hey.

Not really, I play full screen and multi-box. You don't need to look at the characters in most cases or tab to them if you're doing it correctly these days.

I don't really get your logic. What does playing fullscreen have anything to do with a player being casual or not? What exactly is casual in your concept?

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about, because the human eye can undoubtedly see a difference between 720p and 1080p, and is not limited to 20 FPS.

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Even if you need to tab, no reason not to play full screen.

I hope you joking. Difference between 30 and 60fps is like night and day visible.

This comment is literally stupid. You have no idea what you're talking about. I also said nothing of 240hz.

I think he was just referring to how our brain processes spatial details, which is at about 13hz or "20 fps".


What I always found interesting was people insisting on "FPS" without realizing that we don't see in "FPS". Our eyes detect changes in light intensity and communicate those changes to the brain where it's put together, then it's processed to figure out what it means. Different parts of the eyes have different levels of sensitivity. Our frontal vision is mostly cones that see in color, they have very low sensitivity to changes in light (motion) but very high sensitivity to detail. It's the lowest "FPS" part of our vision and is why movies are at 24-30 "FPS". The peripheral vision on the other hand has very low sensitivity to detail but extremely high sensitivity to changes in light (motion), it's populated mostly by rods.

What this means is they can take a black screen and have a random pixel go white at 1/240 and our eyes would detect a brief shift in intense light. Same screen but it's has a color image on it with a random pixel turning from red to pink for 1/240, we wouldn't even notice it unless it was at the edge and even then it would come as "something's different". Flicker testing only shows rod response time and not cone response time yet it's cone response time that matters for most of what we do. Since cones are where we actually see color.