I'm going to buy a used labtop (mainly for mobile work). I'm not that much of a 'gaming person' (at least when it comes to recent games), but theres one thing that has to be perfectly playable on it: SCUMMVM .
I think that system specs are quite different for different games in SCUMMVM. I'm planning to get a used Thinkpad with ~1GB RAM, ~1,6MHz CPU and a ~16MB ATI Mobility graphics card. Will this be enough to play any currently supported game on SCUMMVM?
I guess the graphics card will be the biggest problem.
If it helps, every single ScummVM game runs perfectly fine (including filters, although not really needed on the small screen) on my first generation eeePC (600 Mhz Celeron processor) running Linux.
The only performance issue I ever had with ScummVM was when using the HQ2x or HQ3x graphical filter with some of the newer games (MI3 and Discworld2).
Those filters are by far the most computing intensive feature of ScummVM.
If you are satisfied with the normal 2x and 3x scaler you should be able to run ScummVM on very crappy and old hardware, like others said.
I thought I've seen some minor jerking in "The 7th Guest" on my 2,6GHZ dual core, 1GB RAM, GeForce 6600GT desktop PC, but that might be just my imagination .
Just to be sure, even with games like 7th Guest or (in a future release) 11th Guest, there won't be any problems on a PC this old? My main concern is the graphics adapter with only 16MB(!) of memory (maybe this is not a real problem at all).
No it isn't. If ScummVM played 3D games then yes maybe but they're only 2D games. I don't know about the filter options but all you need is basic SVGA support if you're running games with the original raw resolution without any graphics enhancements and a 16MB card is more than enough for that. The memory capacity of graphics cards is really only for 3D graphics as I understand it. Memory for texture/polygon calculation etc. ScummVM games require none of that.