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Internet Message Format
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1993-07-02
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3KB
From: al885@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Gerard Pinzone)
Subject: Re: Lightning CD: a review
Date: 2 Jul 1993 18:17:43 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Lines: 59
Message-ID: <211u47$lg5@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>
References: <20vhni$i10@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>
Reply-To: al885@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Gerard Pinzone)
NNTP-Posting-Host: hela.ins.cwru.edu
A few days ago I posted an article on Lightning for Windows. I thought
I'd post a little more info and testing I've done:
Here are a few timings I did with a stopwatch. The hardware and
software I used are listed in the original message.
TIMINGS
Software tested: Wing Commander II - Special Operations 2
Test 1: To get from "Start New game" to music
Test 2: To get from end of dialog (last mission) to
cockpit in space.
SMARTDRV 512 512 Lightning For Windows (2 MB)
MTMCDE.SYS /M:20 MTMCDE.SYS /M:8
MSCDEX.EXE /M:30 in conventional mem. MSCDEX /M:0
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TEST 1: 0:11.03 0:05.75
TEST 2: 1:42.89 0:14.69 <--WOW!
All I can say is that this game plays FAST! The "in-between" dialog
screens were unmeasurable. Wing Commander I played even better. The
only other games on CD I have LOOM, Monkey Island I, and The 7th Guest.
LOOM and Monkey Island use the CD technology to mostly play music, not
to store huge amounts of game data. There was an improvement and had
smaller gaps in speech as far as Loom was concerned.
T7G is an odd bird. When I first installed LfW, I left my MTMCDE buffers
at 20 in XMS memory and the MSCDEX buffers at 30 (loaded into upper
memory by QEMM, not in expanded). The game played no differently. I
reduced The buffers to 8 and 4 respectively. There were pauses in the
animation. I reduced the buffers even lower to 2 and 0 (the smallest
possible) and the game was REALLY SLOW. Then I changed them to 20 and 0,
this had a weird effect! The animation was fine, but it seemed to run
a little faster than the audio at times! This was the first time I
saw the mouths move before the audio played! Even still, LfW still
only reported a 6% disk access reduction. T7G ran fine under the
original conditions. I doubt there is (or CAN be) a cache made that
can make any difference in T7G. I think the game just doesn't work
that way.
Again, I recommend this software package highly. I admit I have not
seen the new Toshiba and Texel drives in action, however, based on
the "specs", I really don't see how anyone can justify spending
$500 plus the cost of a SCSI card vs. $200 + $85 for a Mitsumi
drive and this cache program. Also, if you figure on buying a
"faster" cd rom drive and cache it to get double the performance,
forget it....you WILL see a difference between a double spin drive
with a cache and a Mitsumi with a cache, but the performance gain
will be much smaller than you think!
--
_______ ________ ________ "Small nose, loose girls, no nipples, (.|.)
/ ___/ / _____/ / __ / Iczer curls!" -=- Gerard Pinzone ).(
/ ___/ / /____ / __ / al885@cleveland.freenet.edu ( v )
/______/ /_______/ /__/ /__/ Join the ECA Wehrmacht! Kill CM! \|/