Reply 80 of 140, by LSS10999
I had a game that apparently has issues with faster CPUs. It's Thor's Hammer Trilogy by Escape Programming. (http://www.classicdosgames.com/game/Thor%27s_Hammer.html) I've been planning to post this for quite a while, but I'm not sure whether I could describe it accurately enough to know what the real cause of the issue was...
The problem is, that the movement speed of the player and the doors become slower when the CPU clock is too high (actors such as enemies, however, behave normally), despite the ingame movement appears smoother.
On an old Pentium 100 machine I once had, the ingame movement looked rough, but at normal speed. The game is still playable at PIII/500MHz (Katmai), with a smooth and barely acceptable movement speed. At higher CPU speed (starting from 600MHz) the player and doors move too slow to be considered acceptable. At over 1GHz it takes forever to walk to a ladder or turn 180 degrees, and a door would take up to 10-20 seconds to be fully opened, while normally it shouldn't take that long. However, as enemies appear to move at normal speed regardless, making it difficult to turn around and target and enemy when playing at such environment.
However, the game's system requirement isn't too low, as I had to set around 20000-30000 cycles in DOSBox to make it playable just like that on my old Pentium 100 machine.
EDIT 2: After a few further tests on my CUV4X-based system with a PIII-866 CPU, so far the game feels acceptable at up to 566 MHz. Slowdown tools don't seem to work well against it as it has something to do with the CPU clock speed alone.
Good news is that the CUV4X can set the FSB down to 66MHz which means a 50% reduction for 133MHz CPUs, bringing the clock speed down to the safe zone (<600MHz) in the process. However, this is only a temporary compromise as I have to reboot to BIOS whenever I want to change the clock speed yet this is the only game that needs me to do such.
I tried a VIA C3 1.2AGHz (Nehemiah) on the CUV4X for a short while as well. By setting its multiplier to 4 (533MHz) through SetMul, the game is once again playable, and it can be done without having to change anything in BIOS thus no need to reboot. Unfortunately the board cannot detect and initialize its internal cache properly, making it extremely sluggish outside DOS... and yeah, Intel doesn't have such feature on desktop P3s that can help doing so without rebooting the whole system.
The problem persists on the updated freeware release (1.77) as well.
EDIT 3: As tested, slowdown tools won't work well with it, as while some indeed improve the ingame movement, they slow everything down (such as intro and episode selection which don't need to be slowed).
