Sega's Win95/98 offerings?

[dreamcastjunkie]

FOr another Sega PC game that I have but didn't mention, even ON my WinME P4 1.5Ghz, Last Bronx runs too fast... or it sure feels like it. Why were Sega's PC ports all so badly programmed? They made so many of them, and the games are often good, but the porting jobs are so shoddy...

The demos of Daytona, Bug!, and Sega Rally do seem to work, though.

Sorry for the late reply. (It took forever to get my account validated.) I'm sure you've figured it out by now, but if it's running too fast, turn off frame skipping in options.

Not to be pedantic, but it's not really the porting job that causes the problem; in the earlier days of PCs, games - or any resource-intensive program - would use a lot of the computer's resources. If a game needed 16MB of RAM, then programmers didn't have to worry about setting hardware caps because the computers of the time didn't have much more than that to begin with. Nowadays of course PCs are much more powerful so you will have to manually limit how many computing cycles go into your game. It's not just Sega games that do this - you'll run into this problem pretty often with older games. You don't really see it with digital games on Steam or GOG and the like because the publisher would have likely taken care of those issues prior to putting it up.

[A Black Falcon]

I have KernelEx installed, but it's default mode usually doesn't interfere with programs. I tried newer versions of Firefox and they didn't cooperate, even with KernelEx.

Yeah, I used to use Firefox with KernelEx on my WinME machine, but it just doesn't run at all acceptably anymore. Now I use Opera 12.02; it's a bit dated, but it is the newest web browser that I've seen mentioned as working in Win9x, and in WinME at least it runs okay. Plenty of crashes, but that's to be expected... and fewer than Firefox.

Sorry for the late reply. (It took forever to get my account validated.) I'm sure you've figured it out by now, but if it's running too fast, turn off frame skipping in options.

I'm not sure if I've tried that or not. I will.

Not to be pedantic, but it's not really the porting job that causes the problem; in the earlier days of PCs, games - or any resource-intensive program - would use a lot of the computer's resources. If a game needed 16MB of RAM, then programmers didn't have to worry about setting hardware caps because the computers of the time didn't have much more than that to begin with. Nowadays of course PCs are much more powerful so you will have to manually limit how many computing cycles go into your game. It's not just Sega games that do this - you'll run into this problem pretty often with older games. You don't really see it with digital games on Steam or GOG and the like because the publisher would have likely taken care of those issues prior to putting it up.

Yeah, I know this. But just because many games have problems running at speeds they weren't designed for doesn't mean that it was okay design -- I mean, many other games that are just as old run fine on any speed computer!

[roadkill]

I remember downloading the Sonic 3 & Knuckles shareware version for Windows ME back in I think '01 from pcgameworld.com and at the time I was really impressed with it. The music was drastically different from the Genesis version and varied on the type of sound card you had since I believe it was MIDI. I ended up just getting it for Genesis though as it was much cheaper and easier to find and of course I ended up liking the music better on the YM2612.