Whenever command and conquer (original Dos version) changes tracks, the game freezes to launch the next track. My talkie sierra games are similar. For quest for glory iv, it's like the drive is in a coma and needs 3 seconds to wake up every time it wants to voice dialogue.
I don't recall issues like these in my past days of Dos gaming.
If someone knows what I'm talking about and has a solution, let me know
Use a slower CD ROM drive. What you describe was very common with fast drives (24x and up), since they spin up and down all the time, which causes lags.
Under windows 9x, there are softwares to slow down drives. Unfortunately, IMO that's not good enough, the game shouldn't wait for the drive, it should just tell it the music and let you play because even with the quickest drive to achieve the reading speed will cause some framedrops which is not good 😒
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wrote:Use a slower CD ROM drive. What you describe was very common with fast drives (24x and up), since they spin up and down all the time, which causes lags.
This. Optical drives generally need to spin up first in order to read from a disc. Newer drives rated for higher speeds nonetheless tend to take longer to spin up to those speeds. An older and slower (say, 4x or 8x) drive won't have to spin up to as high a RPM, which should get rid of much of the delay.
Software that can cap the speed of the drive might also be a solution, but do such tools actually exist for DOS?
That's what I was about to ask. The drive is new and matches my case color, even has a yellow ID matching the APTIVA's other lights. The system is pure dos. I tried googling things like 'cdrom speed cap program dos' to no luck. I feel it's going to be a 50/50 chance whether or not the TSR exists. Would some generic IDE driver have the function?
wrote:Under windows 9x, there are softwares to slow down drives.
Does the win9x software operate in MD-DOS 7? (that is, DOS mode for win9x -- not a pure DOS system)
If I need a new drive, I might be able to use the old for my system that only runs win3.11 (on top of DOS). How does win3.11 handle this issue?
Thank you. Can't test it at the moment, but if it fails, would the issue be strictly the drive -- or possibly the driver as well?
The best thing to do IMO would be to prevent the CD to spin down m, but does that kind of software exist ? That would solve many issues (loading times, etc) Who needs a CD that may load you game twice as fast as an older one if it takes the same amount of time to spin up ? That's ridiculous.
Imo, the only advantage to use CD drives faster than 4 or 8x is either because some game really needs something faster (I'm not sur if I've ever seen one) or to install your game much faster.
But otherwise, the faster drives are
- louder
- taking more time to spin at a speed where they'll read the CD which causes many problems
I've got a 4x CD drive that's so silent that you can't even hear it unless you put your ear right next to it. That's an excellent CD drive if you ask me ^^
Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative
Who said a silent drive is a good thing? When i start my PC, I want everyone in my neighborhood to hear my retro muscle. I already modded my original Xbox to be as loud as possible.
wrote:The best thing to do IMO would be to prevent the CD to spin down m, but does that kind of software exist ? That would solve many issues (loading times, etc)
The reason they spin down is probably to reduce wear on the spindle motor in the drive. I've personally never found software that could prevent spinning down. (Probably wouldn't be hard to write a thing that reads one or two sectors from the drive every ~10 seconds, though...)
It could be to reduce wear ... but most game consoles from that era don't do this. Sure, some of them had problems with CD drives becoming bad after years, but the wear was never on the spindle motor, it was on the lense mechanism.
Another thing that I noticed : a game like half life waits for the CD drive under windows 9x, but I ran once the exact same version under windows 7 (yeah, this game works on modern machines !) and it didn't do this at all. So maybe that's just the way older windows (and DOS) handle CDs that causes this ?
Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative
CDBeQuiet is confirmed to operate with the SONY CDU701-Q (OEM for COMPAQ).
Thank you very much!
Is this a TSR? I'm not seeing it in my memory.
It probably uses ATAPI command code 0xBB (Set CD Speed).
All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder
Glad it worked out for you!
