Will this puter run AH without stutters and stalls?

[Toad]

I quit playing when my old game puter (really old!) melted the mobo. At the time I didn't think I wanted to spend the bucks to build a state of the art machine.

Now, a better puter than I had has fallen into my hands as a freebie; I sure can't complain about the price. It's certainly not state of the art but I'm wondering if it will run AH in a decent fashion.

It's a Dell Dimension 4550, P4, 2.4G, 2 GB ram with a Radeon X800/256mb video card.

Any opinions on whether or not this will deliver decent frame rates and smooth play?

Thanks!

[Getback]

Stutters, as it seems to me, come mostly from sound. run a dxdiag and set your hardware accelerator to 3/4.

[gyrene81]

Do a fresh install of WinXP...trim the number of background processes to the bare minimum possible without losing functionality...use a lightweight anti-virus that can be stopped on demand...and if I remember correctly 256 textures...no shadowing, no detailed water, and no bump map terrain.

That's just for starters...

[Anodizer]

I quit playing when my old game puter (really old!) melted the mobo. At the time I didn't think I wanted to spend the bucks to build a state of the art machine.

Now, a better puter than I had has fallen into my hands as a freebie; I sure can't complain about the price. It's certainly not state of the art but I'm wondering if it will run AH in a decent fashion.

It's a Dell Dimension 4550, P4, 2.4G, 2 GB ram with a Radeon X800/256mb video card.

Any opinions on whether or not this will deliver decent frame rates and smooth play?

Thanks!

You'll have to turn everything way waaaaaaaay down to have anything close to a decent frame rate..
That PC is probably on the verge of 6-7 years old..  

[BaldEagl]

Well, if you have it and it's free just give it a try.  You can test it offline.

My guess is it will run smoothly but with graphics set to minimum levels.

I got my old Dell PIII 1.2 Ghz with 768 Mb of PC100 RAM and a 64 Mb GeForce 440 GTS to run the game at about 35 fps with graphics turned all the way down.

You'll find my machine preperation, test results and screen shots on the second and third pages of this thread:  http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,270181.0.html

[Toad]

Yeah, I know it's old but I couldn't argue with the price!

It has only XP and a Google Chrome browser on it, plus the AH download that I haven't executed as yet. I still have to get a workaround to program my old CH analog suite. It's probably as close to minimum on processes as it gets.

I guess I'll do the necessary stuff; I had to order more ram to get to 2GB and it's not here yet. Then I'll see what happens. I can live without the fancy graphics but I do require decent frame rates to track and shoot.

[Toad]

My CH gear is all analog. Therefore you can't program the gear with Speedkeys in XP.  Speedkeys works great with Win 98 and I still have a copy. Win 98 takes a max of 500 mb of HD space, Speedkeys is almost nothing. Can I put Win 98 and Speedkeys on a new (no virus) flashdrive and boot from that just to program the controls every once in a great while?

Or is this just crazy talk?

[gyrene81]

You try running that speedkeys in "compatibility mode" under XP?

[Toad]

Yeah, didn't work. In XP Microsoft did something to the way the sticks interacted with the keyboard input.

[gyrene81]

Yeah, didn't work. In XP Microsoft did something to the way the sticks interacted with the keyboard input.

What CH stick do you have? Where there is a will, there is usually a hack of some sort.

[Ghastly]

Confirmed - it doesn't work. 

Speedkeys sent programming commands out through the keyboard connector, which worked up through WIN 98 - but NT and higher didn't allow programs that much access to the keyboard port, and didn't provide API's that could be manipulated to do so IIRC. Presumably, it was considered a security issue.

Absolute worse comes to worse, I'd suspect you could either program the controllers on another computer - or add an internal IDE drive that you boot off of only for programming the controllers.  I've never tried building a bootable Win 9x installation on a USB drive, but I suspect that it might be problematic because Win 9x is going to want to manipulate something that acts like an IDE hard drive. 

<S>

[Skuzzy]

Toad, why not just install the game and see if it can be configured to work with the system?  I know you will have to disable the "Detailed Water" option for that video card.

[Toad]

Yeah, I was thinking adding another small, cheap drive would probably be best. I had the USB stick just sitting around though.  

Skuzzy, from my previous experience with XP, I could get the stick buttons to be recognized and programmed in AH. However, the throttle buttons didn't show up and thus can't be programmed.

The throttle has lost all its programming now; it needs the CH hard reset/reprogram which is only through speedkeys for these old analog pieces.

I probably have some ancient old tiny HD sitting in a drawer somewhere that already has 98 and speedkeys on it. I may have to spend a day just putzing around seeing what I can find that will boot up. 

Anyway, how ya been Roy? Life is good? My best to you and all the Grapevine crew.

[FLS]

Have you tried running speedkeys in safe mode?

[Skuzzy]

Doing good Toad.  How ya been?