The great Acer Aspire One/Netbook challenge.

I bought an Acer Aspire One netbook, though very much not for playing LOTRO. Yet, why not try anyway.

I was able to download a trail client and get the game to work. The videos actually play better. The graphics setting is low, but on an 8.9 inch screen, you have a hard time noticing that. The frame rate is low, yet again, this isn't a setup designed to allow for raids and such, more for simple RP and low level travel.

So with 1 GB ram, 8 mbs of shared video ram, and a 1 GB SD card used as a paging file, and a 160 GB 5400 RPM HDD, it works! Being able to do it on such a tiny system is fun, might make a dinner at Panera more fun!

:eek:

8 MB of video ram?

You sure it isn't 80... or 800?

I don't think 8 is enough for games from 1995.

The BIOS says 8, and I can't seem to adjust it either. It is shared memory though, whose to say it isn't doing something interesting to get past the obvious issue with having only 8 MB of v-ram.

I want screenies.

I gotta see this.

If you can do it on the Acer One, then you should be able to do the same thing on any current gen netbook; MSI Wind, Acer One, Lenovo S10, Asus Eee, etc.

Patience has an Acer One and Clover has an Averatec N1000. So let's see how you did it!

I shall "effort" some screen shots, I'm going to convert the trail account and see if I can use my old SoA key to use my present Benjimir on the system. Don't even ask why I used a trail buddy Key, it was a long weekend.

Still, I dream of my favorite coffee shop, ice tea, and LOTRO...

Now what color is the Acer Patience has? Curious to know if she's a white, black, red, blue or....pink person.

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Originally Posted by Comstrike

I shall "effort" some screen shots, I'm going to convert the trail account and see if I can use my old SoA key to use my present Benjimir on the system. Don't even ask why I used a trail buddy Key, it was a long weekend.

Still, I dream of my favorite coffee shop, ice tea, and LOTRO...

Now what color is the Acer Patience has? Curious to know if she's a white, black, red, blue or....pink person.

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I'm sure it's not too much to ask the kind people at Turbine to supply the required assets to get this completed for your account, maybe for a free month, I'm sure they'd be delighted to help!

I definitely want to see screenshots, and can you take a piccy of it with a camera too, i want to see how the screen looks before I try and do the same.

Were you using Vista ReadyBoost with the memory card, or the LOTRO boost app that stored low res files on it? I did find that on my system, low wasn't too bad still considering what hardware it hard to work with, and I'd love to have something to auction and craft with out of my house!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Noromir

I'm sure it's not too much to ask the kind people at Turbine to supply the required assets to get this completed for your account, maybe for a free month, I'm sure they'd be delighted to help!

I definitely want to see screenshots, and can you take a piccy of it with a camera too, i want to see how the screen looks before I try and do the same.

Were you using Vista ReadyBoost with the memory card, or the LOTRO boost app that stored low res files on it? I did find that on my system, low wasn't too bad still considering what hardware it hard to work with, and I'd love to have something to auction and craft with out of my house!

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I was not using Vista. I did download the low res version of the client. I've been trying to find utilities that might aid the system akin to the readyboost, but no luck. I did tweak the paging file setting, reducing the amount on the main HDD, and maxing out the 1 GB SD card, so it is at least using some of that space I should think.

I'm going to try some heavy testing later today, see how easy play is, but off of my desktop, I'm having relearn keys without my Nostromo handy.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Comstrike

I was not using Vista. I did download the low res version of the client. I've been trying to find utilities that might aid the system akin to the readyboost, but no luck. I did tweak the paging file setting, reducing the amount on the main HDD, and maxing out the 1 GB SD card, so it is at least using some of that space I should think.

I'm going to try some heavy testing later today, see how easy play is, but off of my desktop, I'm having relearn keys without my Nostromo handy.

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Hehe Nostromo, the only way to play a warden, if you catch my drift, one touch awesomeness!

This was the FlashBoost article I was talking about, but sadly it is Vista only. Sounds like you know what you are doing with XP if you put the pagefile on a SD card.

http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/LOTRO_FlashBoost

I'm on right now, at work no less....

Inside the Pony, few if anybody inside, and I'm getting 28 FPS, outside in Bree, light traffic, between 3 and 14 FPS depending.

Again, 8.9 inch screen, hard to look bad inside. For RP, and crafting, and light work, very playable.

I'm trying to research a hack or BIOS mod that might help with the FDDs, Video memory, but in the end, this is intended to help at work, so I can't get to crazy. Sadly I'm going to have to hook my PDA up to take real pics of the system running it. But I'll post the screen shots on www.SonsOfNumenor.com shortly.

You know what, I've always figured it would be easy for MMO companies to make a mobile room for this type of machine.

The room is very very bare bone and a solo instance, where a user can view the auction, do some crafting and even check inventory and bank, and it could run on even lower end systems too. The provision is that you have limited usage, to ensure that people still did have to go in game to do community type things.

I guess the next step is to transition the auctioneer, inventory management and chat over to a xml based live system and allow people to trade and chat in game from mobile devices, I'd pay $5 buck more for that a month for sure, or even sit through adverts etc.

However, something about this doesn't seem very middle earthy to me, I dunno, but it would be good for MMO's in general.

One of the nice things about LOTRO's old AC2 legacy, the Very Low Settings are very resource friendly. I'd love to have netbook able to use my second account just to sort through the mail, inventory items, and work the AH.

I have played LOTRO on some low end machines, but I think that is lower than anything I have tried. (1GB RAM, and a nVidia 6150 integral GPU, 5-30fps in Very Low)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Noromir

You know what, I've always figured it would be easy for MMO companies to make a mobile room for this type of machine.

The room is very very bare bone and a solo instance, where a user can view the auction, do some crafting and even check inventory and bank, and it could run on even lower end systems too. The provision is that you have limited usage, to ensure that people still did have to go in game to do community type things.

I guess the next step is to transition the auctioneer, inventory management and chat over to a xml based live system and allow people to trade and chat in game from mobile devices, I'd pay $5 buck more for that a month for sure, or even sit through adverts etc.

However, something about this doesn't seem very middle earthy to me, I dunno, but it would be good for MMO's in general.

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Nah, just put a web interface on the AH, and allow people to bid that way :)

OK, we have screen shots, if they don't work here, or to view the entire thing at your lieseure, visit www.SonsOfNumenor.com, we have user galleries and the album is there.

http://sonsofnumenor.com/gal01/album...t00009%7E0.jpg

http://sonsofnumenor.com/gal01/album...nShot00007.jpg

http://sonsofnumenor.com/gal01/album...nShot00005.jpg

http://sonsofnumenor.com/gal01/album...nShot00003.jpg
http://sonsofnumenor.com/gal01/album...t00002%7E0.jpg

Realize too, that these screen shots are actually bigger on an 15 inch monitor, than they are on the actual system. On the Acer, they look sharper, more lush, if that is the right word.

That's about what my old Pentium 4 2.5GHz 1GB RAM Ati Radeon 9250 (PCI card, not PCI-Express) looked like.

Looks better than my main machine :)

Nice work, let me see if I can get this running on something I have here to!

Whoa, who'd figure. That's proof of just how friendly LOTRO's code is.

Kudos for the experiment. After that, I'll try to run the game on my palmtop =)

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Originally Posted by elosefast

That's about what my old Pentium 4 2.5GHz 1GB RAM Ati Radeon 9250 (PCI card, not PCI-Express) looked like.

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Old? I still play on a Pentium 4 2.5 Ghz, with 2 GB of ram, and an ATI 1950 GT running off an AGP slot.

Heck, it has the same first install of Windows XP Pro on the same 120 GB HDD. Never re-installed, etc. Treat'em right, they run well.

Now somebody a few months ago, managed to get LOTRO to run, by way of a remote access program, on a Windows based smartphone. That was amazing to see.

The thing here is that my Aspire One only cost $350. Total. Best little machine since my Fujitus B2130. Some say we are doomed to see an X-Box release, but I think the real market is in laptops and netbooks. They outsell PCs, fit a tighter range of hardware, and turn-over faster than desktop PCs. I think there is a huge market for netbook and laptop friendly games.

Some capstone notes.

System:
Acer Aspire One.
1.6 Ghz Intel Atom CPU
1 GB Ram shared with video needs.
8 MB video ram, drawn from the main 1 GB.
1 GB SD Card, not a high speed type either, 950 MB set as paging file.
160 GB 5400 SCSI HDD, 1050 MB set as paging file.
Windows XP Home, SP2.

FPS:
Bree, outside Prancing Pony: Averaged about 7 FPS.
Bree, mapping circle outside west gate: 14 FPS standing, 4 moving on horse.
Bree, inside Prancing Pony: High of 47 FPS, average of 30.
Connectivity:
I've been running it off a slow connection through the Ethernet at work, and have also been able to run it equally well using the wireless G connection off a simple netgear hub.

LOTRO Client:
Whatever the current Mine of Moria client is that Turbine is letting people download.

The client installed, auto-set the graphics, and they remain unchanged from that. Everything is set to low from what I've noticed.

I notice on exit, the HDD spins like mad, loading back into Windows.

I'll have to try using a USB flash drive set to fun as a paging file.

I'll be loading it up to try on my Sapphire Blue 120GB (though it actually came with a 160GB HDD, as many of the AA1's produced after around October did, despite claiming to be a 120GB model) Aspire One in the morning.

If you're sticking with XP, grab eBoostr at http://www.eboostr.com/ It's a program that does the same thing as Vista's Ready Boost. It lets you use a SD Card for your pagefile, instead of the slower hard disk. Many users at www.aspireoneuser.com have claimed good results.

The report on LOTRO in the "Games" forum of the aspireoneuser site wasn't promising. But really, if it's playable enough to let me pick up my ore and scholar consigments every coupla days, that's really all I need my AA1 to do.

If you have a large USB drive handy, perhaps you'd be better off installing LOTRO directly to the USB drive and running from there. It should greatly reduce your battery and drive usage, and greatly speed up texture loading, improving performance, especially while moving. I've been planning to do this for my main computer at home, but I'll need a 16GB drive to cover the high-res textures. You'd need much less to do low-end textures.

For what it's worth, I've run LOTRO on an old Thinkpad T23. I think it had better stats, but wierd graphics issues. For some reason, the game was unable to draw many ground textures. It was unnerving, and cool at the same time to be running around in mid-air, while seeing all the texture tricks used to construct the world... If you'd like to see what I mean, check out my posts in the tech forums here.

rushl

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Originally Posted by DougHillman

I'll be loading it up to try on my Sapphire Blue 120GB (though it actually came with a 160GB HDD, as many of the AA1's produced after around October did, despite claiming to be a 120GB model) Aspire One in the morning.

If you're sticking with XP, grab eBoostr at http://www.eboostr.com/ It's a program that does the same thing as Vista's Ready Boost. It lets you use a SD Card for your pagefile, instead of the slower hard disk. Many users at www.aspireoneuser.com have claimed good results.

The report on LOTRO in the "Games" forum of the aspireoneuser site wasn't promising. But really, if it's playable enough to let me pick up my ore and scholar consigments every coupla days, that's really all I need my AA1 to do.

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The odd thing is that I forced the system to use the SD card as paging just by adjusting down the settings for the main HDD. But if it works better, so much the better.

The second Acer I bought for the spouse and mother of my two kids (I named Benjimir after Benjamin my two and half year old son when I was working many hours away during the weekdays most of the last two years) her unit was only supposed to have 120, but in setting it up, I found it had a 160 GB drive.

The other notes would be that I remove all bloat software, have a memory cleaning program, run Scandisk08, and have the OS theme turned to Windows Classic with no menu effects. Much as I would do if I had Vista.

Battery life isn't an issue, I have the six cell battery and can get either four or five hours of run-time in the game, or nearly 12 hours of general use.