Cafu has been designed to run on a very broad range of hardware. Therefore, meeting or failing a certain set of minimum system requirements is not necessarily a question of getting all-or-nothing. Instead, the details of a systems hardware usually just scale the performance and/or the quality that the Cafu engine can achieve on that particular system – it even has automatic fall-back capabilities built-in in order to handle old and very old hardware well.

Your computer system should meet the following minimum requirements for Cafu to run (failing these requirements probably means that Cafu does not run at all):

• Intel i386 compatible CPU with 2 GHz
• 1 GB RAM (2 GB with Windows Vista or 7)
• 3D graphics board with OpenGL support and 256 MB graphics RAM
• Windows (2000, XP, Vista, or 7) or Linux operating system
• TCP/IP (network drivers)
• On Windows: DirectX 7.0 or higher

Systems that do not meet these requirements may still work fine with Cafu, but both the main processor and/or the graphics processor RAM may easily be exceeded by loading larger maps with many textures, resulting in very bad performance. You can use the Cafu Options dialog then to reduce the texture quality and/or load smaller maps.

In addition to the above, here is a list of recommended system features that allow Cafu to run reasonably well (in all cases, more is better):

• Intel i386 compatible CPU with 3 GHz
• 2 GB CPU RAM
• contemporary 3D graphics board with OpenGL support, programmable GPU and 256 MB graphics (GPU) RAM

In order to use the advanced networking features of Cafu, the network environment of your system must be appropriately configured.

In other words, if some of the modern commercial 3D computer games run on your system, then this is a good indication that Cafu will work, too.

We are developing Cafu under Windows and Ubuntu Linux, and test it on as many platforms as we can get access to. We have only little experience with other Linux distributions, but have received only positive reports up to now, regarding compatibility with all supported operating systems.

In order to install Cafu, simply unzip the packed file that you downloaded from the website. Please make sure that the directory structure is preserved. This is the common extraction process for nearly all contemporary decompression software. However, for some older programs you need to explicitly specify a command line option or check a checkbox. A new directory like Cafu-9.06 will be created and all files will be extracted into this directory.

In order to upgrade the engine from an older, existing installation, please delete all the old files and directories and then re-install the new version as stated above. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused by this, but this is the best way to avoid many possible upgrade and version conflict problems.

Because the installation makes no changes to your system, it is sufficient to just delete the Cafu-x.y folder for a completely clean de-installation.