well, to give these devs the benefit of the doubt, perhaps there's something about the pc platform that made it hard to put out a smoothly scrolling directdraw sidescroller, as i'm sure they had a chance to look at some console games from the time to see what that's supposed to look like. speaking of that, gex is another case where it runs smoothly on ps1 but has inexplicably jerky scrolling on pc.

i think using a wrapper with a framecapped vsync should possibly fix all of these cases on a modern PC, disregarding some other compatibility issues that can crop up with some titles.

I noticed the hickups mostly when textmessages/infos are shown. They scroll the other direction and cause hickups.
I love that game and it's very beautiful. The macport is very annoying because there are no 70hz and therefore it's always laggy.

Don't forget to use 640x400! I get the best results in 640x400 8Bit.

Yes smooth scrolling like on the Amiga is very rare on PC. But if you look at giana worls, or dxboulder there are some pc-games that have beautifull smooth scrolling. That brings me to the idea that we should collect some win9x smooth scrolling games 😉

dr.zeissler wrote on 2022-07-03, 06:19:

Don't forget to use 640x400! I get the best results in 640x400 8Bit.

at least on my particular setup, oddly 640x400 is the only mode that ignores the dxdiag refresh rate forcing and runs at 75hz instead. so i wouldn't even know how to set 70hz, given that <640x480 is obviously inaccessible in windows desktop, and hztool never worked well for me. i don't get why that particular resolution would run better anyway as it's not like this is a DOS game that would use standard VESA timings.

at 640x480 it seems to run at 69 FPS with blips to 70 FPS in hardware mode, while with it turned off it was anywhere from 55-65 FPS. no real difference visually, both settings stuttered all the same.

On certain video cards, resolutions lower than 640x480 will only have one screen refresh rate which can't be easily changed in Windows. At least with S3 video cards, 70 Hz screen refresh rate will be forced for 320x200, 512x384 (except on certain Trio64V+ cards, which forces 72 Hz instead) and 640x400.

The game looks best with square pixels and on a faster computer, 16-bit color depth which can be noticed with transparent objects and 3D backgrounds.

ON 16Bit I did not get real smooth gameplay. This only worked for my machines in 640x400/8bit/70hz.

That's why I said faster computer. 😉

8-bit color depth should be used on computers that can't handle the game with high color depth smoothly.