WC3 needs a pentium, really.

I'd increase the drive cache size through the mscdex line, ignore the setup program, and force the machine type to slow.

Then cross my fingers and hope.

FMV is really an 'at least pentium 90' thing, imo.

Smartdrv can cause problems with games that stream data from CD.

If you put your ear to the case and listen very carefully, you can hear your DX2/66 saying it wanted to be a DX2/80 when it grew up 🤣

But that can get you into more problems and depending on your cache and RAM speed grades could make things not perceptibly faster if you have to add wait states. Then even when it works it's probably not night and day, 3 stutters per 5 secs instead of 4 or something.

I don't have smrtdrv installed.
I don't expect the game to play well, but it should be playable. At present it isn't playable at all though.
What if the CD ROM is too fast? Would a double or triple speed CD ROM drive fix it?

naujoks wrote on 2024-08-07, 06:44:

During installation I got a warning that my CD ROM drive ist too fast (it's 24x speed, I don't own a double/triple speed drive)

You could try this tool to slow down your CDROM but I don’t think it will solve your gameplay issue.

http://tools.dosforum.de/#cdbq

naujoks wrote on 2024-08-07, 20:03:

I don't have smrtdrv installed.
I don't expect the game to play well, but it should be playable. At present it isn't playable at all though.
What if the CD ROM is too fast? Would a double or triple speed CD ROM drive fix it?

It's not impossible. I kept trying to install Command & Conquer on a 486 DX2 with a 40X CD drive, and the installation kept crashing. I was pulling my hair out, swapping cables, cleaning the disk, etc. Once I slowed it down to 4X using CDBQ it installed perfectly fine. I guess things can get truly weird when a program in DOS that never expected speeds above 4x is trying to stream data off a CD at 40x.

Awesome, I'll try that out.
To remind you, I don't have gameplay issues. The missions play fine, it's the movies and the scenes on board of the spaceship.

I played Wing Commander III on a 486 DX2-66 with a 24X Creative IDE CD-ROM back in the early 2000s, and the cinematics and gameflow videos (the ones where you click things) ran just fine. It was a long time ago, but I think that I did make sure that I booted without QEMM loaded and made sure I wasn't running Smartdrv. This was under DOS 6.2.

Wing Commander III is generally not speed sensitive. Just something in the sound that cracks every now and then. Otherwise I had just tested this in my SB Live 5.1 test. Very fast CD or DVD drive, no problem, even 2 GHz CPU and 512MB RAM didn't bother when you start the game from Windows 98SE.

DOS 6.2 Test up to 500 MHz with DVD drive.

That's what I remember as well.

I vaguely recall having a dodgy 4x cdrom that would cause stuttering bitd. I increased mscdex's cache size.

https://www.computerhope.com/mscdex.htm#syntax

Basically, I gave it a huge sector buffer with the /M:#### flag, and said to use extended memory for it, with the /E flag.

This is mscdex doing the buffering, not smartdrv.

The 'theory' I was working on, was that the controller was having to dispatch re-reads from the media, due to the drive being dodgy, and the crc checksums on the reads failing. This stalls the read, as the handler (cdrom driver and mscdex) must re-fetch, causing the stuttering.

Increasing the sector buffer did not fully resolve the issue, but did greatly help.

It also made the setup program mad that it was too fast. I ignored it.

Non specific to this game, but typically what I found, back in the day, when I got a faster than the game expected CDROM, was that it would fill the buffer in an instant, go "oh I'm not needed now" and spin down, the game would use the buffer, and the CDROM had to spin up from zero again to fill the buffer.... and it was the spin up time that was screwing things up.

The /M:#### specifically caches the cdrom's TOC, not its files.

If the issue is one of the laser losing its track after seeking (eg, you have a dodgy cdrom drive), then caching the whole TOC will reduce head movements, and thus reduce track loss prevalence.

Smartdrv caching caches data, and would cause drive spindowns.

The more heavy handed approach though, is to use the shsucdx package, and use the iso mount cdrom emulator. Since this game does not care about the actual speed, just the reliability of the reads, using the iso mount driver with 4 disc images should heavy-handedly resolve this issue.