shonky performance with black and white 1

Saytan · 15 Jun 2007 at 22:10

my mrs PC (Socket A Sempron 2800+, SIS741 chipset, 1GB DDR, GF4MX 80GB IDE, WXP Pro, kept clean by me and i'm a tech for a living) is painfully slow running black and white 1, a game designed for far lower specs than this machine, and i'm utterly stumped.

she's running 800x600, medium detail and 32bit (32 bit was a touch quicker than 16 under testing so we stuck with it)

i've run these kind of settings on my old P4 1.6, and it was fine...

Hugogo · 15 Jun 2007 at 22:18

I seem to remember there being issues with SP2 XP. If thats what your running?

Saytan · 15 Jun 2007 at 22:21

it is, will investigate that further thanks

HangTime · 15 Jun 2007 at 23:33

Only speculating but I wonder if the lack of pixel shaders is hurting her here? The GF3 was on the market by the time B&W came out and although it may have seemed fine on gf2 level hardware (I played it on a gf2mx) our concept of what is good performance was probably lower back then.

For example I tried running Red Faction on a P4-2.7/512meg pc3200/gf2mx system last year and it chugged quite a lot in places.

Not sure about what B&W was like in comparison, but I do know that B&W2 performed really badly. Looking here: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2735 you can see that even in 640x480 with no AA the 7300GS (which should be considerably faster than the gf4mx) manages sub-20fps.

GAMEfreak · 16 Jun 2007 at 18:37

B&W 1 doesnt even work for me under SP2. running it on SP1 is perfect though. i dunno what'l fix it honestly. if SP2 wasnt an annoying *sweary* i would be playing Populous: The Beginning which i can't get working...

EddScott · 16 Jun 2007 at 21:19

I gave up soon after release. I got my chaps all geared up to finish the boat and the game would crash.

Sad really because I really wanted to play it at the time.

n3crius · 16 Jun 2007 at 21:23

had a massive clear out here today (moving house, ditching everything I don't want) and I came across the B&W box. No way could I part with this thing. Classic.

I could hardly sleep the night before its release and I went down to the local store 30 minutes before it opened with a friend. We were the only 2 that turned up at that time, clearly we had overestimated the demand in Grimsby that morning!

SpaghettiOs · 16 Jun 2007 at 21:53

I assume you've tried it in compatability mode on SP2. I had managed to get it working without a hitch on SP2. If I remember correctly, you also need to set compatability mode for the installer, so make a shortcut to it and go to properties->compatability and set it to windows 98. That might work.