So, let’s say I’m trying to get an old Unreal engine game to run on a new computer. Let’s say it’s something like Deus Ex, the GOTY edition patched up to v112fm.
It’s behaving really strangely on a Dual Core CPU with 2GBs of RAM and a GeForce 8800. Sometimes it goes superfast with the mouse jerking the view hither and yon uncontrollably, no matter what setting I use for mouse sensitivity. Other times it seems to control normally, but there’s a weird lag I think might be associated with sound. Firing a gun throws everything off, and doing the lockpicking in the tutorial takes forever, as does the scrolling text for dialog.
Anyone know of any tips for getting an old game like this to behave?
Did you try running it in compatibility mode? If I can play Wing Commander III from the Kilrathi Saga in Vista using that, you should definitely be able to play Deus Ex.
The Steam version works fine for me on Vista on pretty much the same hardware, though I don’t know if they did anything special to it.
When I tried the CD version under XP before, I did have to turn down the sound hardware acceleration before it would behave, though. I don’t recall it affecting lag, but if it does seem sound-related…
Go to your Deusex.ini file and set the game speed to about .3 or lower. It shouldn’t actually slow the game down any slower than intended, but it does have the effect of compensating for really fast computers.
I JUST dealt with this problem in Unreal Tournament at a LAN party. Some players were moving ridiculoulsy fast, and then getting held back by the server (in SP the game just ran as if some one had set the game speed way too high).
It’s not so much uninstalling games, as it is reinstalling the OS on a formatted harddrive to clean up Windows, and then not bothering to reinstall the game.
I have a dual core Vista laptop and this is what generally works for me. It worked for Thief II and Anachronox, both of which I have recently installed.
Although I tend to find I need to modify the game executable to make sure it works using the tool downloadable at this site as there is no way I know of to make a game use only one core except after it runs otherwise.
