This is not mentioned anywhere directly, but has certain interest for me: what are the minimum system requirements for running a 3d GameStudio-made project (normally game?). I'm not talking about viewing specific amount of triangles at good fps, just running as fact (not crashing).

When carrying my two (1, 2) games around on usb drive, letting people test these, and sometimes games just randomly did not work.
Startup crashes were as well reported by users of one of sites that reviewed one of games (russian).
For "One and Light", some computers did run the 'intro' screen well, but crashed as soon as game went to level with 3d elements.
In some cases, replacing music with dummy sound did fix the issue. In others not.

So I'd like to ask, what are the system requirements to actually launch a 3d GameStudio project. Information about required DLLs (and if they can be redistributed with game to increase compatibility) would be helpful as well.

Developing interactive 3d applications with 3d GameStudio is quite pleasing, but probability of target system simply not running the finished thing is quite demotivating

DirectX 9.0c has to be a recent build (I think June/ July/ August 2010 or newer).

Gamestudio is guaranteed to run on all normal PCs. The specs listed above are very low, so almost every PC fulfils them.

However, there are of course many ways to create a project that runs nowhere and crashes often. You'll find in the manual under "Publish" or "Starting the engine" what DLLs you must include with your project. They are normally automatically included, so you don't need to care. Only when you rely on external software, such as Codecs required for playing your music or video, you have to know what you do. When you tell that your music crashes often, the problem might lie in that area. Otherwise, use the -diag option to get some info from your users what the problem is - the music, your script, or something else.

I found A8 does not work with integrated video cards having Intel 945 chipset - like my 4 year old laptop, and my girlfriend's old pc. And as I remember you could buy a pc or laptop with this ancient chipset even 1-2 year ago.

It might have problem with the last directx issue, because the error message says that the video card is not dx9 compliant, or something like this... but sometimes no error message, just crash, or blue screen without graphics.

The same with A7 compilation is fine.

Tested on one of older computers that was crashing at game startup with -diag:
So, indeed, a bit outside the range of supported hardware.
Is there a way to make these run with A8 engine, or separate distribution of earlier (I'm certain that A5 and A6 projects did run good on similar specs) engine version is needed?

Intel 82845 is indeed an old chipset that does not support DX9. Intel 945 is a normal chipset that works fine with DX9 programs such as A7 and A8.

Chipsets that don't support DX9 still work with A8, but you can not use all features. Simple rendering works, but shaders or shadows might not work. You can check the device properties and then disable those features in your game.

When a program gives no error message, but just crashes, the reason is not the chipset. There's something wrong on that PC, most likely a faulty DirectX configuration or driver.

"3D Device is not DirectX 9 compatible!"

Couldnt be that the reason ?

845g is directx 8.1 card, not directx9 compatible.

945g+ is dx9 compatible
950m+ is dx9c compatible
intel does not procude dx10 or dx11 compatible cards.