I have two PCs that I use, one runs XP, the other W2K. I have a third Testing PC that runs XP. I think I need a third Dev PC that runs Win98 because I discovered nasty bugs on Win98. Here I was thinking everything was Ok..and then I discover it totally is buggy on Win98 machines.
I find that "Virtual PC" does a pretty nice job for this kind of task. In fact, it becomes even more useful when testing localized versions, since you can install Japanese, German, French, etc. OS's as virtual machines (assuming you have access to such OS's). This also makes it _really_ easy to test from a clean install, as you can easily archive your OS in a clean state and abort any changes you make if you want to revert back to clean. So you can easilt test XP vs XP with SP2, for instance. I understand there are other similar software packages out there, but I have no experience with them.
I've got 2 dev machines and one tester, though they obviously all serve as test machines. One is my primary computer (one I'm on now) which is a desktop. Then I've got my wife's laptop which I occasionally develop on (in fact, I wrote my scripting engine so I could develop on her (or any) machine, without needing a compiler. Nice choice, I believe.) Finally, I've got an old K6-2 450MHz or something, with Windows 98 and like 64MB RAM. Each has a pretty extreme variety of hardware and software, so I'm catching a lot of things I'd miss if I just bought nVidia video cards or the like.
1 Dev machine, 2 test machines (3 in all) Test machines are :- 1) AMD 500Mhz - 128MB - 16MB Geforce2 Card (XP/Win98) 2) Intel 600Mhz - 256MB - 32MB Matrox G400 (XP/Linux) Oh and a spare PII 450Mhz CPU if I need it
I have 3: P2-450 with 256mb and TNT1 P3-800 with 512mb Geforce2 GTS Athlon 64 3000 with 1 gig ram and radeon 9800PRO
Too Many PCs. File Server: XP 2400+/512mb/ 900gb Raid 5/ Win2k Server Main Dev Machines: (I use incredibuild) Athlon 64 3400/1gb/10k Raptors-Raid 0/Geforce 6600GT/Win XP XP 2400+/1gb/Geforce 6600GT/Win 2K XP 2200+/1gb/Radeon 9800 Pro/Win Xp Test Machines: Dell Precision M50 Laptop/1gb/awful Geforce2go 500/Win XP Athlon 1Ghz/256mb/GeForce 3/Win 2K P3-600/512mb/Voodoo 3 3500/Win 98se Mac: Power Mac G4 867mhz/1.5gb/Geforce 4 iBook 800mhz/640mb to play old games on: 486-133 /64mb/ 2mb Et6000 video card And I have about 5 no-longer-used machines stacked up in the back room.
2.8ghz P4 - main comp 1.2ghz eMac - mac testing vaio laptop - wife's comp + portability when on road 1.1ghz Athlon - old system, for testing, rarely used these days 700mhz Athlon - old system, excellent for casual games testing!
Two I have one 1.7ghz box where i'm still running MSVC6 in XP. I have a second box running Mandriva 10.1 OE that runs my mail/ftp/www servers. I also have a samba share. When developing cross platform / network games I keep all the code on the linux box, compile over the lan, and use a PuTTY terminal to GDB the linux version of the game running on the remote machine. This is the easiest way I've found to debug graphics apps on linux and it means the only time I have to take my focus off the XP box is to play the game - i mean, test a feature - on the linux box. Near the top of my long list of Things to buy when I have extra money is a powerbook running OS X so that I can repeat this process. Also it would be nice to sit in a cafe or even direct sunlight while developing the more mundane parts of a game. I would be willing to suffer the xTools IDE for a chance to be surrouned more often by ugly bags of mostly water.
main dev pc: 3.4ghz p4 with raid and all that fancy stuff home dev pc: 2.4 ghz p4 dev laptop: 2.8 ghz p4 celeron 366/i810: testing celeron 1.7: testing celeron 450: testing wife's celeron M notebook: testing I know AMD is faster, but I don't have one for some unknown reason Going back and forth between the office and home was a huge pain, so I *finally* set up subversion and tortoiseSVN last night to go back and forth between the two without missing files.
Duron 750MHz Win2k GeForce 2 mx - Main Dev machine Athlon 2.?MHz SuSE 9.3 GeForce 4 - Linux box for linuxy things The above two share keyboard and mouse with Synergy2 so appear as a dual monitor system with a different OS on each one. I'd like to add a Mac Mini as a third monitor, then I'd have a cool Blitz max dev system. plus Athlon XP 1800+ Radeon 9000 - net machine Amiga 1200 - nostalgia box and toddler amuser. I've taken to using the Linux box for wings3D because it seems to be a litttle more stable.
I use a winXP 3.0Ghz and a laptop for coding and testing We have a small "test lab" with a lowend win98 500Mhz. But I´m thinking of buying some old GPUs to be able to test more lowend configurations. It does not have to cost a fortune?! But for now I try to test on as many computers I can get my hands on at work, at friends and so on. But the main part of testing is done by iteration testers downloading the new releases from our site and posting feedback back to us. Im surprised how many serious buggs that are actually discovered by iteration testers.