Posted by David Nelson on 26, 2000 at 10:34 PM:
I've got a socket 7 type Intel Pentium 200Mhz processor running with 32MB of RAM memory, and a 16MB ATI Xpert98 video card. I plan on running ArcadeOS with MAME in pure DOS, and I planned on running mostly simple classic games like Pac-Mans and Donkey Kong, etc and a few shooters like 1942, and Twin Cobra is becoming one of my old favorites again.
My problem is this...when running a game such as Twin Cobra when there's a LOT of stuff going on (ie. lots of enemy planes + lots of enemy bullets + my shots are well powered up), the game suffers some slow down. Not even so much slow down as much as framerate degradation. The game seems to maintain relatively the same speed, but the action BLINKS over the screen rather than flowing movement.
What should I upgrade that would help solve this problem the most? I can't afford to get a new motherboard and put in a super-fast processor. The only thing I could do is drop in a fast socket7 chip like an AMD or something (but those are so unreliable). I was hoping to put in more RAM memory, like at least enough to get it to 64MB but even that should'nt make THAT much of a difference. I'm thinking it's probably most the video card's fault. I bought the ATI Xpert98 a while ago anticipating to run my project on an arcade monitor, but now I'm just going with a computer monitor. So perhaps it's the video card I should upgrade?
I'd really appreciate some advice on this. Bearing in mind...I'm not made of money. The classic games like Pac-Man etc, enjoy almost 60fps (59.85ish) but it's the older games that sometimes have a lot of ACTION that suffer when it's going on that I'd like to fix.
Thanks very much.
-David Nelson : captain NH Video Warriors