is there a way to kill hardware video performance on early windows games running hopelessly too fast? \ VOGONS

is there a way to kill hardware video performance on early windows games running hopelessly too fast?

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First post, by stanwebber

Posted on 2024-01-07, 16:30

stanwebber Offline

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Posts: 390
Joined: 2022-02-16, 21:26

among the recent culprits i'm thinking of are:
- black dahlia
- space bar
- atlantis the lost tales (dos ver is unplayable due to mouse driver)

i have an old core2duo laptop with an nvidia quadro nvs 160m and trying to play any of these games is impossible since any movement is rendered hopelessly too fast (even on the lowest in-game setting for speed). i downgraded to a pentium3 laptop with an ati rage mobility m1 and it's still way too fast, but at least it's actually playable now. my next laptop target would be a 486 with a c&c 65550, but i think it would struggle a little bit with this era of games. my athlon xp desktop builds have a ati radeon 9800pro and 9600xt respectively.

how can i address this speed issue in early windows games without resorting to full blown os emulation? (scummvm is fine where applicable since it's not really emulation.) are there bios or os settings that will kill video performance? i know i can use 3rd party tools to downclock the radeon's gpu & ram to some extent, but it's not nearly enough. this approach might work with the rage mobility m1, but i'm just not that familiar with it. are there other tools along the lines of dxwnd, but addressing this specific issue?

i'm guessing that throttling the cpu will slow everything down (video rendering included), but i'd rather avoid that if i can.

Reply 1 of 3, by rasz_pl

Posted on 2024-01-08, 11:32

rasz_pl Offline

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few options
1 disable directdraw hardware acceleration , either using https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/micr … trol_panel.html or with a slider under Troubleshooting https://www.deskshare.com/resources/articles/ … celeration.aspx

2 try those modern directdraw wrappers, they fix issues in old games under newer windows
https://www.nongnu.org/wined3d/
https://fdossena.com/?p=wined3d/index.frag
http://dege.freeweb.hu/
https://github.com/CnCNet/cnc-ddraw
https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper
https://sol.gfxile.net/ddhack/index.html
https://dxgl.org

Open Source AT&T Globalyst/NCR/FIC 486-GAC-2 proprietary Cache Module reproduction

Reply 2 of 3, by feda

Posted on 2024-01-10, 01:35

feda Offline

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Joined: 2010-07-04, 02:20

There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Speed issues might be the least of your problems with these Win 95/98 games you mentioned, as there are other incompatibilities.
Without wrappers/patches/emulation, you may be out of luck.

Black Dahlia in particular is infamously incompatible with anything past XP. It has that weird graphical corruption when moving the cursor.
If you insist on newer Windows, you can use this special hacked version of dxwnd https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/ge … d77617d4f/#7031
It is imperfect and doesn't entirely get rid of the issue but makes it less frequent.
Regardless, you will run into the scrolling speed problem which is too fast on any CPU from the last ~15 years.
You can either track down the unofficial patch "Black_Dahlia_NoCD_Patch_v03.exe" or simply make these changes to bd.ini:

1[options]
2spin edges= 1
3spin edge height= 40
4spin edge width= 50
5spin vres= 2
6spin hres= 2
7vjoy control= 0
8vjoy res= 1
9slide vjoy res= 1

Space Bar looks like a standard non-3d Win9x game. Good luck slowing that down without emulation.
But you can try ddrawcompat, dgvoodoo2 and dxwnd, they have some framerate limiting options.
Oh, and I just found out it was recently re-released (no clue if/how it runs on W10/11) https://www.zoom-platform.com/product/the-space-bar

As for Atlantis, what do you mean "dos ver is unplayable due to mouse driver"?
Dosbox website lists it as supported, it should work.

Edit: actually, none of your three games are 3d-accelerated so I don't know why you're trying to slow down the GPU since they're CPU-dependent. Try and see how low you can underclock that.

Last edited by feda on 2024-01-10, 01:49. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 3 of 3, by rmay635703

Posted on 2024-01-10, 01:40

rmay635703 Offline

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Posts: 1572
Joined: 2019-01-19, 19:32

It’s unfortunate many later systems make it hard to disable cache, windows would take all day to boot but the game might run ok

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