Heya Clyde,
I’m not thinking that machine is going to be very cooperative no matter what. Just the limited screen resolution alone is going to cause you grief, let alone the fact that with an empty project you’re only running at 18 frames-per-second, which is a good hint that once an actual mesh is on the screen you’re likely going to be experiencing something more akin to a slideshow. If you’re actually loading the 256x256 images provided, and it’s responding as though they’re too large, I’m not sure that’s a problem I can solve, or that I should solve, simply because the machine is clearly not up to snuff all-around.
Your screenshot is 800x600, which is a step-up from the 640x480 you mentioned. Even at 800x600 though this is what you’ll be dealing with due to the interface being laid out and setup the way it is:
You can see how crammed it all is, which maybe I can adjust a few a few things to make some more room, but even that aside if you’re running at 18 frames-per-second with an empty view then throwing half a million triangles on the screen is going to be hell on your CPU/GPU and your experience altogether.
I know I can sit and track down every little thing and somehow make it all work (aside from the poor performance, PixelCNC is already extremely optimized on the mesh-rendering side) but that’s at the cost of time/energy adding actual functionality and capability to PixelCNC that makes it more usefu to both existing and potential customers.
At the outset I had originally decided to not support hardware more than a decade old, but I’ve opted to at least meet some older hardware halfway because that was only a few hours’ of work to make that happen. After that it really becomes a diminishing-returns sort of thing. I’m still adding a little more to the renderer pipeline to make it more robustly handle the strange landscape of OpenGL implementations that existed back in the 2.0/2.1 era, and that’s the very last that I’m willing to do on that front, because there’s still a lot of other work to do before PixelCNC is where I aim for it to be.
Thanks for working with me to try and get it going, but this is where I have to call it quits. I am still interested in determining why it’s not able to access the user documents folder for being able to write a configuration file, that is important, and another one of those things where different Windows versions demands that the program do different things, but if an XP machine is capable hardware-wise then I want users to be able to use PixelCNC as designed.
Thanks again.