Resolution and Aspect Ration Independent 2D Game Engine Design

[SilverWarior]

Note that if such game content is encrypted, you'll be breaking the law in some countries just by using the quoted approach.

Yes I know that. I never bother decryptic any content, if I can see some content by using some easy unpacker (usualy found on the web) I do otherwise I don't bother too much.

In either case, you are not making a sound argument here. Many 3D games (FPS/RPG/etc) use rather huge textures, which are later downsampled.

Yes but most of them requires computer with quite powerfull hardware to run.
Also 3D graphic engines sometimes use huge textures wich are actualy colections of smaler graphics (theese are not to be considered as high resolution graphics) and then only portions of theese are used as different 3D models textures. This aproach is usualy used to speed up the thexture lodaing into graphic memory. Also if theese colections are properly organized they can use les graphic memory that it would be used if all of the small textures would be loaded one by one.

In addition, if you load all graphical resources to system memory, even legacy computers with 256 Mb of RAM (plus another 1 Gb of swap file) will handle it since graphics typically has relatively low footprint compared to sound, music and video files.

256 Mb of ram won't alow you to load much graphics in it especialy if we're talking about some highres graphics.
As for the swap file it's size varies a lot. On Windows based system the size of a swapfile or. pagefile as named by Microsoft is 150% of the size of RAM by default. So if you have computer with 256 Mb of RAM the size of the swap file would be 384 Mb. Loading any graphics from the swapfile to graphic memory would be werry slow due to slow hard drive acces. This will result in lots of slowdowns or some graphic content not being drawn when it is suposed to.
Take GTA San Andreas as an example. If you play this game on a low end computer and do some flying with the planes you could sinply crash into the tree before it would be even rendered (texture for the tree isn't loaded into graphic memory fast enough).
Also you should take into consideration that you would ned RAM for other data to. So unless you have smal levels, a few of ingame objects, you can forget about having any higres graphics on pre mentioned computer with only 256 Mb or RAM.

If you are worried about video memory, then you should know that both Direct3D and OpenGL load/unload managed resources to/from video memory on the fly, so only the stuff that is being drawn is usually stored in video memory.

Partly true. But nowadays when there is posible to exploit graphics card processing power to do other things besides just drawing graphics you should note that theese operations also use video memory.