I'm always surprised by how poorly the original Age of Empires runs on period hardware. For example, I'm playing it on a Pentium II 450 at the moment, and the game gets very choppy with only a handful of units on the map. Both the original executable and the Rise of Rome version have this problem. Age of Empires II runs considerably better on the same machine.
Is this normal?
You should ask Windows game questions in the Windows forum.
wrote:You should ask Windows game questions in the Windows forum.
You're right, I forgot we had that 😀
Moderators - feel free to move this thread.
I ran those games on earlier hardware and they ran just fine (going from memory).
Collector of old computers, hardware, and software
wrote:I ran those games on earlier hardware and they ran just fine (going from memory).
This is more in line with my expectations, given that the system requirements are a 90 MHz Pentium and 16 megs of ram. However, I've seen the games perform poorly on a 200 MHz Pentium Overdrive, a 233 MHz Pentium MMX, and now this 450 MHz Pentium II.
Perhaps it's the old graphics adapters that are being overwhelmed, not the CPUs?
Everything was done in 2D, the video cards didn't need to be that good. Could just be you need early versions of directx to work correctly.
Collector of old computers, hardware, and software
I tried one of these games, can't remember if it was AOE 1 or 2, on an obscure ~1998 OpenGL card which had poor DirectDraw support. It ran correctly but it performed very badly. With a more mainstream ATI card of the same era, it ran much better. I don't remember exactly what card it was, I think it was a 1997 model ATI Rage of some kind.
This was probably an extreme case, but the card's level of DirectDraw performance can definitely make a difference.
I figured out what the problem was: PowerStrip was running in the background and making everything slow. Duh... should have figured that out sooner. AOE runs nicely now on the PII.
