The Player of Games: Part One..

When we look back over the history of gaming, we can see that the first games consoles were the "blip-blip" tennis type games that attached to our TV and played in two-player mode. If you're nodding your head here, you're admitting to being a certain age!

Suddenly, in-rushed the age of the micro computer with Commodore and Sinclair home-computer available for the very first time to people at home. The drawback with these systems, with a BASIC programming language, was that they weren't really personal computers at all - their marketing was based around gaming, with available games - in audio tape format - numbering in their thousands.

The advent of the Personal Computer - with a target business audience - brought about a change in the marketing of home computers, and the very same marketing swerved away from computers towards games consoles, and that trend has continued with the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, xBox, Nintendo and others, all vying for a piece of the market in a very competitive industry.

These systems are simply glorified PCs, with certain tweaks and aptimisations to make them specific to the games console industry.

But, increasingly, people are wanting similar gaming functionality on their PCs. As such, companies like Alienware and others have come to life, with high-graphics capabilities and enough memory to run full-blown, almost photo-realistic three-dimensional games.

Of course, the beauty of such an approach, means you effectively get two systems for the price of one: A personal computer and a games console: During the day its your work-engine, and you can use email, surf the web, write letters etc, but at night it becomes your games console, fire-up action games, arcade games, connect to the internet and play games with other internet users - a serious dual-purpose system.

So I've whetted your appetite, but what do you need in my computer specification in order for you to be able to comfortably enjoy the wealth of available games?

Well lets start by re-examining some elements of the hardware, that we looked at in detail during last summer:

Most games are graphics-intensive and memory-hogs. What I mean by that is, the display rendering has to be very high-quality in order for (1) you to enjoy the game and (2) to allow for your reactions to occur on screen at precisely the same time as you press your keyboard key (or move your joystick or console or whatever other control method you are using).

Additionally, in order to do that, they must process your actions and reactions as quickly as possible through the PC, and thus they take up a huge amount of memory.

Typically, then, when specifying a gaming PC, you would look to include a very high-end video card and as much memory as possible.

Rarely are PC specifications so fixed that you cannot request these two elements be upgraded - so be sure to let your vendor know that you're looking for a gaming PC when you start to look over a few. Indeed many vendors now create a gaming PC with just such a specification so that gives us a second reason to mention it.

Below is a minimum specification for a gaming PC. Be aware that this is MY take on what is required for gaming right now (with a little help from my Professional Service colleagues at Bermuda Microsystems). A word about "minimum configurations":

Firstly, they are just that - "minimum" and will probably negate you from being able to run the most up to the minute games that are available without there being poor performance and some "screen-lag and jitter" (ie the characters on screen do not respond immediately to your commands).

Secondly, the specification for gaming PCs advances almost monthly, thus if you were to look over this article in November, it will undoubtedly be obsolete. If you're happy to take these points into consideration, then I'm happy to take the unusual step of being prescriptive:

3.0 GHz Processor

2GB Memory

256MB separate Video card (ie not on-board)

80GB Hard-drive

DVD-Rom

4 x USB ports

17" monitor (CRT or TFT)

Next time: PC Gaming Part 2!

Bob Mellor is a senior business technologist with twenty years experience in the IT industry. He is a Professional Member of the British Computer Society, and currently Professional Services & Technical Support Manager at Bermuda Microsystems Group. He can be contacted on bob@bmg.bm