XNA HiDef you Don’t Want

I was doing a lecture this afternoon to the first years and, frankly, it wasn’t going well. The microphone was not working, which meant I had to shout, and I’d not uploaded my slide deck correctly so I had to wait for my little laptop to download the presentation from Live Mesh.  Then I fired up my first empty XNA project to show the class how it worked and was rewarded with this.

Not good. Id used the machine to write Windows Phone games with no problem and I’d never seen that message before.  Fortunately we were near the end of the lecture and so I just showed that I could in fact get Windows Phone to work and then everyone had to leave.

Someone at the back had shouted “Use Reach” but at the time this hadn’t registered. Later, I took a look at the project settings:

 

Turns out that if you have fairly simple graphics hardware, like the one in my little laptop, it can’t handle the HiDef graphics and you have to select the Reach option for Game Profile.

I did this and everything worked, so I should be OK for tomorrow.