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First post, by Joakim

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Hi

One of the games from my childhood that I remember was Nox. I saw it on gog.com for 4-5 bucks so I bought it. I installed it on my Surface pro (windows 10). I saw that Phil had some guide describing how to get gog-games to work but I just went ahead and copied all the game files to my windows 98 retro machine and the game booted without any issues. The problem is only that is runs at about 10 fps.

So my machine is a super socket 7 Acorp 6ali61 with a 350 MHz Amd K6-2, 64 Mbyte of dram@100MHz, it has a Matrox G400 dual head installed and a Sound blaster 16 PnP.

From the back of the box:

Namnlös.png
Filename
Namnlös.png
File size
455.74 KiB
Views
1067 views
File license
GPL-2.0-or-later

So I think I should be able to run it with standard settings with at least 30 fps? Or do you think gog.com has added something a retro build can't handle?

Reply 1 of 9, by Hezus

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I used to play it on a pentium 200 MMX and it ran fine in low res mode so I think your system should be handle it. I've not tried to GOG version but I doubt they changed anything major to the required specs.

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Reply 2 of 9, by Joakim

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It is probably a cpu intensive game as there is no 3d acceleration going on. It might also run better on a Pentium than AMD but I have no way to invesitgate.

Changed it to 8 bit mode and get maybe 20 fps. Kind of playable.

Reply 6 of 9, by ripsaw8080

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willow wrote on 2021-04-10, 19:01:

Nox use 3d acceleration.

I was under the impression it is 2D (ddraw).

willow wrote on 2021-04-11, 08:29:
ripsaw8080 wrote on 2021-04-10, 20:50:

Nox does not behave well on my Windows 10 system unless I run it in a window with DxWnd, so maybe GOG has done something to their copy...

Have you used dgvoodoo 2?

Nope.

There is a patch by Peixoto for Nox. I haven't tried it, but I wouldn't be surprised if GOG used it.

Reply 7 of 9, by Joakim

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I disabled my sound card, and the permformance increase was enormous. I could run the game in 800x600 with the highest setting and still get roughly the same performance than I did with sound on.

I am not sure if this is normal or if my Sound Blaster 16 Pnp (ISA) is crap or if it just needs new drivers. I should have a pci sound card laying around but not sure if it is too new for Win98. I will do some more test tomorrow.

Reply 8 of 9, by gerry

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I'm surprised Nox has all these problems! I played it on a modest system, a p3-500 with integrated graphics i think, and it was fine. Maybe it is that sound card and/or driver.

the game itself was fun most of the time but as it got nearer the end it just became a non stop relentless series of battles and a chore, so i never did replay it.

Reply 9 of 9, by Joakim

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So I did some more digging and saw that you can run either Nox.exe (very small exe) or game.exe (large exe). Nox.exe gives me about the same performance as running with the sound blaster turned off. According to some forum post I read it seems to be the other way around sometimes, maybe for newer machines.

However, now the game runs at an uneven speed rather than always being choppy. I tried to force activate v-sync in my graphic card settings but then neither of the game exes would run.