A speed trick for playing older PC games with Virtual PC

Oct 20, '04 09:26:00AM

Contributed by: miggins

I haven't seen this anywhere else, so this may help someone. I really enjoyed playing Monkey Island years ago, and I came across a Windows PC version of Monkey Island 3, which I had not played before. I know Virtual PC isn't the best option for games, but I thought a 900MHz G3 should be able to handle a game that ran on a 200MHz Pentium originally. So I installed Windows 98se onto a new disk image under Virtual PC 6.1.1, and tried running the game. It was terrible -- the audio worked fine, but the graphics were hardly updating at all, several seconds per frame.

I tried a few things, but what really worked was going into the Windows display control panel, and then into Advanced -> Performance. Turning *off* the graphics acceleration did the trick. I think Virtual PC and Windows were each trying to boost performance by not drawing unneeded frames, and the result was no frames being drawn! Putting Windows back into good old 'draw every pixel' mode fixed the problem, the game plays just fine.

Comments (4)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20041018204113979