Situation Comedy and vista - performance problem

dualloop

Hi,
I saw in a thread in this forum that situation comedy was vista compatible out of the box.
Im currenty using vista home premium and i am experiencing very jumpy graphics (which also makes the sound jump). This happens outside sam and max's office, while walking to and from bosco's, when you arrive at the tv studio where the director is waiting,
and when you are in your car chasing the two rats. The other places are fine.

Edit: This game worked fine on Windows XP SP2 with 1GB RAM, with no jumps. Thought i better say that this PC has been upgraded with Vista.

Here are my specs

Windows Vista Home Premium 32Bit
Pentium 4 3.06GHz (2CPUs)
2GB RAM
ATI Radeon x1600 512mb (with latest Vista drivers)
Sound Blaster Live! 24bit (with latest Vista drivers)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Emily

Upgrading to Vista shouldn't have caused these problems to start, but is it possible that Vista has stuff running in the backround that wasn't running with XP, that could be interfering? Please take a look at this thread - the post that describes the firewall. Sounds like a similar problem. I'm wondering if there might be a firewall or something similar running as part of Vista that's interfering with the game.

Another possibility I can think of is that the new Radeon drivers caused the change. Video drivers (Radeon's in particular) can be finicky with our games. I'm not sure if rolling back to your old drivers is an option, if only to see if the problem goes away (it could lead to other problems that I'm not aware of), but that's something you could do to at least try to figure out what's causing the game to behave differently now than it did before your upgrade.

dualloop

Ok, i'll try that.
Thanks Emily.

OMA

It seems that Windows Vista includes some DRM cr*p that is constantly checking that you are not playing high definition movies "illegitimately". Yes, it's checking it ALL THE TIME, even when you are not watching anything! This is done to avoid frame-by-frame copying of those kinds of movies, so that slows down the system quite a lot for things which are completely unrelated to HD movies, such as playing games (to Microsoft it's OK to please movie studios at the expense of worsening the user experience for all the tasks a user can do with his/her computer!). So I'd better use XP. There's no point in using Vista just because it's the latest thing... There's really no advantage and there are lots of drawbacks.

With Episode 2 you shouldn't have speed problems in XP. If you do, then Episode 3 will play horribly on your system, since it definitely has some lag issues (see threads in this forum about Ep.3)

dualloop

hi again emily.

I've just tried sam and max culture shock(what i could of it) on my vista PC and i experienced no slowdown in their the office, i had slowdown in their office in Situation Comedy and The Mole, The Mob and the Meatball.
I dont think it is a vista issue. Not being bigheaded, just thought i better let you know .
Also another question, what does warp drive do?
i heard on other threads that it gives sam or max fur but it doesnt.
Just wondering how i get it working cause i enabled it and started a new game.
By the way, thanks for answering so quickly to my last post.
Thanks

Emily

Thanks for the details. It doesn't necessarily sound like a Vista problem. There have been some changes to the game engine since episode 1 came out - maybe that's the culprit.

Warp drive does... absolutely nothing.

i heard on other threads that it gives sam or max fur but it doesnt.

Ha! That would be funny.

dualloop

I thought i'd report a bug.
When i managed to get the rats to swerve into the sewer, the megaphone, gun and horn were still displayed.
when i clicked on the megaphone dialoge from the chase played but the subtitles stayed there after the chase finished with a black box where the character icon was displayed.

Monger

Yes, I have performance issues as well. It depends on the area you are viewing, i.e. when you enter the casino, everything is well. As soon as you walk a bit further to the right, the stuttering begins. If you leave this area, everything is smooth again.

I'm using Vista Ultimate 64Bit, and the latest ATI drivers (Catalyst 7.1 , X1900XT).

Djdoug

I had major problems as I posted before.. but I found that after a reboot... and closed alot of the background stuff... it returned back to being playable.