What happens if you turn the sound and music off? Does performance improve dramatically? I remember using an AWE64 Gold on a Pentium 233 MMX system and getting good results with games up through DirectX 5. But once I started to try DirectX 6 games, performance plummeted for CPU-intensive simulations until I got rid of the AWE64 in favor of a SB Live!. SC3000 ships with DirectX 7, so you probably want to use a PCI sound card for good SC 3000 performance on any CPU.

If you turn down all of the various options (as for a minimal system), is the performance still poor? If that is the case, you may have some other system issue causing you grief.

yes i disabled the sound in game, and I set it to 640x480 small map with animation only visable on the closest zoom, its very bad still.

It's a long shot, but you might see if the issue described here is relevant:

http://www.sc3000.com/knowledge/showarticle.cfm?id=0588
https://web.archive.org/web/20021128060648fw_ … help/fix2.phtml