Hi all,

<fluff> Funnily, the third-most recent post on this sub-forum is from me around a year ago, looking for ways to follow along the series on my Mac laptop. I have a hazy recollection of making a start by following Ted Bendixson's series but for whatever reason I didn't progress very far. (In fact, I just noticed that the issue posted on his GitHub repo is also by me - although I have no recollection of it lol.) </fluff>

I would like to make a more serious attempt this time round to work through the series, and I'm open to buying a reasonably-priced/configured Windows laptop - one that will be good enough to use for the sole purpose of working through the series and building the game along with Casey. Any suggestions (whether in terms of specs or actual laptop recommendations)?

Also, are there any caveats building with more recent versions of Windows? (I think Casey is using Win 7 but I'm not sure.) And if it's preferable to use an older version instead of the latest one, can/should I downgrade, or should I consider using a VM?

Also - and I don't remember if I asked this before - but is installing Windows through Bootcamp/VM to work through the series a viable option on an Intel (2018) MacBook Pro, or would I face issues?

Any computer should do, at least at the start. At some point OpenGL will be used which require hardware supporting that (something compatible with at least DirectX 10), but any computer should be able to do it now.

Later in the series the CPU is stressed a little bit (with lighting calculations) but even my CPU from 2010 was able to run it (not fast).

There are no problems that I'm aware of with new versions of Windows. What will require some changes is using the more recent version of Visual Studio as some small things that were valid then aren't now by default (variable shadowing mostly). It's not a big issue and easy to fix.

If you start now, don't try to use emacs unless you really want to, Casey switched to 4coder (which might not be the best editor since it's not being updated by the original author any more) during the series and uses his own editor on his day to day work.

Also the series didn't get a lot of episodes recently, but most people follow along for 50 on 100 episodes, and then are able to figure things by themselves.

Thanks for replying!

So if I want to attempt to go down the virtual machine route first, do I need to look out for anything other than DirectX support? Some superficial googling shows that Parallels and VMWare Fusion supports them.

What is needed is OpenGL support (I believe HMH first uses OpenGL 2.1 and then moves on to 3.3). I mentioned DirectX because when looking for hardware they often mention supported DirectX version, and OpenGL 3.3 I believe is the "equivalent" of DirectX 10.

But HMH only starts using OpenGL after day 100 (probably later than that) so you have plenty of time to figure it out.

I don't have much experience with virtual machines so I would recommend trying them before buying to see if it's working smoothly. Also there are free virtual machines like Oracle VirtualBox.