mchlstrt Posted January 23, 2002 Share Posted January 23, 2002 I saw a thread about this a little while ago but I don't remember there being a clear answer. PwrBook G3 400, RageM3pA (RageMobility M3 1.0f13?) 8megs. Movie skips ahead, or rather freezes then jumps forward to catch up. I've only played a few games on this machine, I'm usually on the Desktop. Here's the odd thing. I trashed the prefs & switched from 1024 to 640 to check the mod thing (in the other thread). Movie played with only a few hiccups. "Aha, (that's me) the same limitations that affect the resolution of the graphics inhibit their smooth playing-backedness." After acouple a runs I switched back to 1024 to check the difference in the width of the view, no prefs trashing. Movie plays without a hitch. 1024-hackhackcough 640-hiccuphiccup 1024-puurrrrr. Did I fix somethin or somethin? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mensch Posted January 23, 2002 Share Posted January 23, 2002 Dude! I had that problem, what it was, was the CD was scratched (in my case just a grime smear). Try cleaning surface so there are no finger prints, smears or removable gunk. If it is a real scratch then your up the Creek. I wondered too about the error since as you described sometimes it played sometimes it was like grinding a cat in a meat grinder (figure of speach people) anyhow check the CD. The gunk may land on your head then you have to clean that too. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted January 23, 2002 Share Posted January 23, 2002 That's strange. Most of the playback problems are probably related to the video driver or something loaded in the background (an app or whatever extensions). So what you're saying here is that you had problems with playback at 1024x768, you trashed the Prefs file and then switched your resolution to 640x480 (so CM is now running at 640x480). Playback was still bad at 640x480, but then you switched your desktop resolution to 1024x768 (while CM remained at 640x480) and playback was fine ? That seems kind of strange since the higher desktop resolution would limit some of the video memory for CM. So my assumption would have been that running the desktop at 640x480 would have been the best performance in this case. Did you have a lot of graphical mods loaded up with these tests or were you playing with the default textures that come with the CD ? Actually I wouldn't suspect the CD to cause this problem. If you've performed a Full Install (and you're not playing directly off of the CD) the CD should only be accessed for copy-protection checks when you launch CM (and I think when you start a scenario). 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mchlstrt Posted February 17, 2002 Author Share Posted February 17, 2002 My bad, I didn't fix nuthin'. I must have tried an 'ideal' situation because when I try a number of different turns I've saved I still get the same problems. Explosions, tank kills & such seem to effect it. Moving the camera view, larger turns & higher-res graphics seems to effect it. Tends to be worse as turn progresses. Lower screen res IS better, mostly. Cache Profiler 1.4 doesn't seem to do much. Hard to pin down because among other things the same turn played over to try different conditions always comes out a little different anyway. It seems to be the way this particular combo manifests being graphically overloaded. I'm bumping it back in because as I said I've seen it brought up before & no one recognized it. If I ever discover anything more useful I'll post it. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidh Posted February 18, 2002 Share Posted February 18, 2002 How heavily 'modded' are your game files? I experienced similar problems awhile ago when I had modded buildings past the limit the Mac files are happy with... Reverting to earlier graphics files cleared up the problem. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gyrene Posted February 19, 2002 Share Posted February 19, 2002 How much RAM do you have on that PBook and how much virtual memory are you running? It sounds like you are using a lot of virtual memory, with intermitent lag like that. Gyrene 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mchlstrt Posted February 24, 2002 Author Share Posted February 24, 2002 Good call Gyrene, thanks. I've never been one to use VM myself & it didn't occur to me to check that when I inherited this PBook. Waddadope. That took care of the vast majority of the problem. What's left feels like a different sort of delay, though it would sound the same on paper ( do we have to start saying "on pixels" or something ?). Turning off the cache seems to make it worse, but I haven't been able to really test that thoroughly. I've got 192 meg (it had 193vm turned on). I'm slowly switching to as many good lo-res Mods as I can find, for this & to level out the 'downres-ing' effect I mentioned in another thread. I would expect that to help a lot. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gyrene Posted February 24, 2002 Share Posted February 24, 2002 With 8 Megs of VRAM I'd stick to 800x600 when playing CM. Btw, the prefs file doesn't affect things much on the Mac as far as screen res changes go, so I would not bother dumping it after every resolution change. Do not turn disk cache off, matter of fact it would not hurt to make it a little bigger than the default size. (By 1 meg or 2 only), also get rid of any unneeded background apps, like 3/4 of the junk Norton Sytemworks installs (Like that infernal disk light) if you have any. Gyrene 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mchlstrt Posted February 24, 2002 Author Share Posted February 24, 2002 I was talking about turning off the backside with Cache Profiler 1.4. Again, it's hard to quantify the effect because of the variables, & the fact that it seems like it might get worse over time. I would have turned off the disk cache if I could have. It's at 6144k now, so I'll try it at about 8meg. I do turn off Disklight undsoweiter. Good time to do anoyther search & destroy on that stuff anyway. You're helping a lot Gyrene, thanks. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.