No luck
I was hoping perhaps the issue was XP related.
So I swapped my hard drives (I keep Xp and 98SE on removable IDE's - no problems or conflicts with dual booting and stuff) and put in a drive I use for testing Win98SE programs and stuff (before I make them to my good install of the OS.
Sadly the problem continued. However when I turned down my CD drive speed to 8x it slowed enough that it almost was bearable, almost. But my Cd then jumped to 14x-32x or 17x-40x but no option for 10x or 12x speed from the software the company provides. I tried even Nero Drive speed and no luck at giving it a 10x or 12x speed, it wouldn't switch to them. Apparently my Plextor 40x UltraPlex has 4x,8x,14x-32x and 17x-40x speed options only.
I even tried slowing down the SCSI bus (I have a Plextor Scsi Cd-rom which isn't demanding on the cpu as an IDE drive would be and I can then have 4 IDE hard drives
) from 40mbps down to just 5mbps, no luck.
So with all that I have tried (worked on it from about 3pm till about 8pm when I finally gave up) I finally came to the following conclusion:
While I can top 1xx fps in a Q3 type game, can push tons of polygons in a Flight Sim, or hear sounds all around me, and crunch numbers and photoshop graphics with the best of them, I can't get a game that recommends a P166/200 to work properly.
I just wish companies would anticpate that the specs they create a game for will be around for more than a year and by Moore's law will be ancient. To make the game able to be scaled or at least work with perhaps a process of twice the power later (of course they had no idea the game would be run on a P4 2.4ghz). But still when you see other games work on the fast system it leaves you wondering.
Oh well, guess I need to build me a second computer to play these older games.
