Freezes up Need good cheap video card!

[troopie]

I got WinSpmbt yesterday and started to play it. Now it freezes up when playing a save. So, I have scoped the problem, my onboard video card only carries 16meg of ram, shared from the 128 meg system ram. It's a PcChips M810 system board. Can anyone suggest a solution, add more system ram? Or better, a good cheap video card compatible with the M810. It's blerrie frustrating to have this game, and not to be able to play it.

System specs
Duron 1300
128 MB system ram (112 available)
16 MB SiS 630/730
Win98 SE

Dankie,

troopie

[Mobhack]

troopie said:
I got WinSpmbt yesterday and started to play it. Now it freezes up when playing a save. So, I have scoped the problem, my onboard video card only carries 16meg of ram, shared from the 128 meg system ram. It's a PcChips M810 system board. Can anyone suggest a solution, add more system ram? Or better, a good cheap video card compatible with the M810. It's blerrie frustrating to have this game, and not to be able to play it.

System specs
Duron 1300
128 MB system ram (112 available)
16 MB SiS 630/730
Win98 SE

Dankie,

troopie

Start with a real video card with 32+MB of on board video RAM. Your shared card is eating real RAM, and the shared RAM used for video is not fast, compared to on-card video RAM.

then try adding memory - windows does better the more RAM you add anyway.

You may want to try increasing the windows swap file size, but real RAM is miles better. (You will want to change it if you put more RAM in anyway, and when you do you will want to defrag the drive to ensure the new swap file is one continuous unfragmented file)


Cheers
Andy

[Arralen]

I have run WinSPMBT with both nVidia Fx5200 card and ATi Radeon 7000 (IIRC), both with 128MB VidRAM.

Both cards are among the cheapest you can get, and you may want to watch out for a fan-less version (as I did with both), which saves you troubles and noise with them.

Do avoid MX-cards under all circumstances, they're crap ...

Check out the M810 FAQ http://radel.inet.net.nz/m810lmr.html#vga

But do not forget to add "real" RAM .. 128MB is barely sufficient to run Win98SE and Word (but do not put graphics into your docs, or you're into trouble..), but not WinSPMBT ...
And check the [vcache] settings in ... lemme think .. system.ini it was, IIRC. There should be some entry like

Code:

---

[VCache]

MinFileCache=24576

MaxFileCache=24576

---

This will result in Win98 using a fixed-sized file cache in RAM of 24MB size. If you do not set 'MaxFileCache', the cache size will happily grow to very large size, eating up your free RAM while running an APP and doing file I/O ...

[junk2drive]

Check your motherboard for an AGP slot. If it does not have one you need a PCI card.

[Arralen]

Oh, yes, he's right.

Versions <1.6 (IIRC) of this board do not have an AGP slot.
If so, you need an PCI (not PCIe !!!) card.

I cards I mentioned above should be available as PCI cards as well. Over here, strangly, the Fx5200 PCI cards are 2x as expensive as the Radeon 7000 cards (~35Euro vs. 70+ Euro). Personally, I would go with the ATi card, especially as the whole system isn't that up-to-date as well .. anything more expensive would be wasted.

[troopie]

Thanks okes,

According to the documentation for this mainboard, it has an AGP 4x slot. I'll order one today and I should be in action soon. Time, of course, is the devil.

Shame! here comes the baas. Back to work

troopie