[Dara100]

I've been installing a lot of old games in Xp and there is one problem for which I haven't found a solution. There are several games such as Zork Nemesis where the cursor is way too fast even adjusting the in-game options. Black Dahlia, Egypt and a handful of others are also having the same problem. Running ZN on a slower Pentium 4 slows the cursor significantly so I think that is definitely the problem. Running in Virtual Machine with Win 98SE makes no difference and since these are Windows games, DosBox and VDMS which have CPU throttles don't work.

There are a few older CPU slowers like Turbo and Mo'Slo that work fine for Pentium machines but I've tried them and they don't work on Core2Duos. Does anyone know of one that will work?

[kuze]

Well, you could simply run some CPU-intensive app like SuperPI or any what-have-you-CPU-stressing-and-benchmarking-tool. Just assign it a high priority in the task manager, and your CPU will be kept busy.

[VoodooFX]

Return to Zork should work with DOSBox according to their homepage, granted that you have the DOS version of the game.

I think that Black Dahlia was "Windows only" game, so DosBox & VDMSound can't help you there.

[Collector]

For DOS games DOSBox should always be the very first thing to try.

[Dara100]

Kurze, that's an interesting thought. I'll try it and see what happens, but of course I'd rather have a dedicated program that I could control more precisely.

VoodooFX, that might solve the problem for ZN but I still need to find a fix for the purely Windows-run games. Thanks for the tip.

And yes, thanks to DosBox, VDMS, Scumm, VM et al, I've been able to install and run ALL the old dos games, which I thought would be the problem. It's only about 10% of aprox 200 games (so far) that have been problem children. I'd say that XP SP3 has come a long way in compatibility with games as well.

[Melanie68]

I used CPU Killer when I played Zork Nemesis. It slowed down the cursor for me.

[Dara100]

Originally Posted by Melanie68

I used CPU Killer when I played Zork Nemesis. It slowed down the cursor for me.

Thanks, Melanie68. I'll try it. Was that on a Core2Duo system?

[Melanie68]

I have an Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.8 GHz processor and it says in parentheses 2 CPUs. So I guess that's a duo core? I'm not sure.

[Dara100]

^^^^

Whoopee! It worked! I'm using the newest version which supports hyperthreading, which is what your system uses to simulate 2 cpus, but it works as well on Core2Duo, actual dual core on one cpu.

I had to throttle it 80% (!) but it works great. I'm off to try the other games with the same problem.

Thanks a lot!

[Melanie68]

You're welcome.