Choosing an operating system
OpenHoldem has been originally designed to work on the 32-bit versions of Microsoft’s Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems, but it supports all later versions too (and Windows 2000 no longer). When choosing a botting machine and an operating system the following points have to be considered:
- Does your favourite casino work at this system?
- How much resources — especially RAM — do the operating system and the casino need? (CPU is secondary, as at least OpenHoldem doesn’t use much computing power. The author of this manual page could easily 250-table at one of his machines if there were no crappy casinos and no casino security). Being leight-weight means that you could run multiple virtual machines at one hardware for better stealth and/or multiple casinos at the same time.
- Do you want to exchange tablemaps with other botters? (In the past most tablemaps were designed for Windows 2000 classic style, but since the introduction of automatic table-resizing most tablemaps work independently of the desktop theme.)
- Does your favourite casino support overlapping tables? The ability to take screenshots of partially or temporary hidden tables greatly improves the quality of the input and significantly reduces the risk of incorrect decisions if e.g. the table-hopper opens a new table that for a short moment overlaps another table that requires action.
The ability to scrape overlapping tables is only available at the more modern operating systems, but not at the leight-weight ones like Windows 2000 or Windows XP. So each operating system has its pros and cons and unfortunately there is no one that combines all the positive sides. So let’s have a look at a concrete list.
- Windows 2000: completely outdated nowadays. MicroSoft ended support for this operating system and most casinos require more modern operating systems. Our compiler (MicroSoft Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition) does no longer create code for this system either, so OpenHoldem (the official version) no longer supports Windows 2000. If you really need it you would have to downgrade the project files and compile on your own.
- Windows XP: just like Windows 2000 this operating system is a bit old, but most casinos still support it and and many botters prefer it for its stability and its small memory footprint. To reduce the memory usage even further many botters install minimalistic leight-weight versions (called e.g. “Tiny XP”).
- Windows Vista: this operating system requires more resources than Windows XP, it needs at least 512 MB RAM (but this won’t be enough, as the system alredy usess 448 MB minimum)..But Windows Vista provides a major advantage: scraping overlapping tables if the aero theme is enabled. No longer any bad input due to occluded tables is a major advantage for any screen-scraping poker-bot, that might out-weight the small disadvantages
- Windows 7: considered more stable as Windows Vista and according to a poll preferred by 40% of all botters nowadys. One common “problem” with Windows 7 however is its restrictice user account control (UAC). Most people finally chose to run OpenHoldem (and other botting software like hopper and Bring) as administrator.
- Windows 8: nearly unused in the botting-world, so we can’t really assess this operating system.
- Windows 10: this is the most stable version of Windows we have ever seen and it supports overlapping tables out of the box. On the downside it needs at least 2 GB of RAM, but RAM is cheap nowadys, so Windows 10 became the preference of some experienced botters.