First post, by Malik
- Rank
- l33t
Problems : Lock-ups of DOS games, usually protected mode CD-based later DOS games, in a fast machine.
Initial Basic Setup :
DFI CA61 Socket 370 Motherboard
Intel PIII Coppermine 1GHz CPU
PC-133 256MB SDRAM
Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra AGP
Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 SLI
SBAWE32 PnP CT3990 connected to SC-55 MKII
LAPC-I
Dos 6.22 installed in Primary IDE Master, 1st partition.
Games noted to lock-up/hang (so far) : Little Big Adventure, Under A Killing Moon, Descent.
Hangs about 1 to 5 minutes after starting the game.
These problems were not seen in my P133 or P166.
What I tried : I thought the speed is killing these games. This board has switches to change the multiplier to set the speed but this CPU is not affected, since the multiplier is fixed at 7.5.
Hence the only thing I can do is to change the bus speed (from 133MHz) to 100MHz or 66MHz. (Via jumpers)
Changing the bus speed to 66Mhz brought down the 1GHz to 500MHz (66MHz x 7.5)
(The BIOS P.O.S.T. screen displays the CPU as Pentium III 500E.)
And now, no more lock-ups! 😁
This is my hybrid system since my 2nd HDD - Primary IDE Slave contains both Windows 95 and Windows ME. And the 1st hard drive has another parttition with Win2000 installed. (My Windows 2000 may take a hit by reducing this bus speed.)
I'm reserving this system for resource-intensive dos games, while my 486 deals with true, dos older classics. (The reason I'm using dos games at this unnecesary speed.)
Another of those oddities I've noticed with the ever-elusive and most cryptic dos-classic-machine puzzles.
Playing old games is only half the fun. The rest of it is alotted to the tweaking of the machine in MAKING these games run! 😁
EDIT:
1. Posted this so that anyone with hanging problems (relevant to this) might try this to see if the problem can be solved.
2. Yeah, seems like I had more free time this weekend to try these "experiments". (The other being my joystick-midi stuff which I posted yesterday.) 😁