What's the best way to check to see what the minimum system requirements for a game will be in order for it to run? I'm currently developing a game and would like to know how to best test this. I don't really have any old computers in the house, so I wasn't sure if there was another way to test it out. Thanks in advance.

You can go to "Control Panel" and click on "System" to check the computer's hardware. For RPG Maker requirements, you can click "Help" or press F1 to view its requirement to run the program.

So basically if you can run the RPG Maker program then you can run any game you make with it?

Nope, you will need the RTP.

Not necessary to meet the requirement, you can still run RPG Maker even if you doesn't meet the requirement except resolution, it must be more than 800 X 600. If it doesn't met the RAM or graphic card requirement, the software will slow down. Same thing when you run a playtest or play any RPG Maker games.

Well that was one of the things I wanted to test out, but I wasn't sure how to test out a game with a lower-end graphics card/RAM if I don't have a computer equipped with such.

That I'm not very sure. Usually the requirement for RPG Maker games can be easily seen and know by the smoothness of the character movement.

If you turn on the accelerator for RPG Maker, it will run in 40 FPS and you can see that the character is moving smoothly through the panels. Otherwise,if it doesn't even that you had turned on the accelerator then your computer isn't meeting the game's requirement.

Scripts and graphic size affects the entire game. Therefore, the more resource you use the higher your game requirement will be.

Im not sure if this answers your question.

Sort of. Thank you. I guess at this point I would have to make an approximation. I also wanted to check and see if the game would run on non-windows computers (ie: linux, Mac, etc.) Is there any way of checking that without having to physically run it on one of those types of computers? Because I don't own any non-windows computers, but I wanted to clear up any future questions about it should it come up when people want to play it on a non-windows computer.

ask around the community, someone will know if RMXP games work on those OS's/computers.

usually, just use the RMXP's system requirments. however, if your doing things that make your game lag heavy, up them, the RAM at least. sometimes in a RMXP game, youll make it so lag heavy that it will just lag and no reasonable computer can make it not lag, so youll need to be careful to keep your that kind of lag down. for example, a lot of parallel processes type of events, will put you into some serious lag area.

For testing on another OS (which you really should do if you want to say that your game is compatible) you might be able to do so at a library, coffee shop or copy shop. When I've been in a real pinch, I've done testing on a Mac at Kinko's.

Alright, thank you for the help!

You can also bring up Task Manager in Windows to see how much memory that your game process is taking up.

However, Video RAM is just a guess and since it probably resorts to using system RAM when there is no Video RAM left, it's a difficult thing to estimate. I would use a rough guess of whatever would be your largest set of graphics (tileset plus active characters plus active events / animations) plus the amount of memory used in a double buffered screen. That might give you a ballpark and then just round up to the nearest power of 2.