Under Windows 98 the game takes a long time to load CD, even in the middle of conversations. Half the time an error I get an error message telling me the disk isn't there or needs cleaning. Help.

Have you, in fact, cleaned your disc? Actually, it sounds like your CD-ROM drive may need cleaning. A cleaning CD for CD players and drives will set you back about $5 and is well worth the investment.

The discs look fine to me. The CD-ROM is only a few months old. The original wore out and I had to replace it.

This game had some sort of copy protection on it that kept it from playing at all in one of my old drives. Maybe your drive is having difficulties with the copy protection too. Are you having troubles with other games or just this one? If it's just this one game that the drive is having problems with, it could be the copy protection or even a bad CD. Sometimes a CD emulation program will help, if you have the hard drive space.

It sure sounds like something is causing your drive to have trouble reading the CD. It could be the drive failing, even if it's only a few months old. What model drive is it? I had one off-brand drive (a Delta) only last 2 weeks. Or, if you live in a very dusty or smoky environment, it could be the drive needs cleaning (as BacardiJim suggested).

Only this game has this problem. The drive is a Benq 56x max.

Question: You said "under Windows 98." Just to make sure, are you running Win98 or running WinXP and using compatibility mode or a Win98 emulator?

Assuming you are, in fact, using Win98, then my next guess is a bad install. Make backups of your saved games, then try an uninstall/reinstall of the game. Finally, move your saved games back into the appropriate spot.

Note: Certain types of installation glitches can also corrupt saved game files. First try an uninstall/reinstall and attempt to load one of your old saved games. If it still takes forever or hangs, then try starting a new game and do a save/load at the first available opportunity and see it THAT takes forever to load. If reinstalling the game makes your old saves hang but lets a new one work then you know it was an installation problem. If you try this and even the new saves hang during loading, then it is more likely either a hardware or driver problem.

I wonder if the drive's speed is creating a problem.

You might try a CD speed slowdown utility like CD Bremse. I think Nero's CDSpeed utility also allows you to slow the speed of your drive, but I haven't tried that one. I've only used CDBremse.

http://www.cdspeed2000.com/?link=cdspeed.html
http://www.cd-bremse.de

I don't know the language CDBremse is written in.

I don't know German either, but the interface is self explanatory once you download the program and start it up.

In any case, CDspeed is in English.

It seems the problem with Titanic was a warning. I was playing Pandora Directive, and that same annoying message popped up but this time I couldn't get past it. The drive spins when I put a disk in it but all the programs I've tried act as if there is no disk in the drive. Doesn't matter if it's a data disk or audio disk.

Even a 32X drive is too fast for Pandora Directive.
I played it in DOS, so I didn't get the same message about the CD not being there. But whenever I switched CD's I had to access the CD before the drive had spun up to speed or the game wouldn't be able to detect it. (I forget if I hit the Enter key or clicked an OK button to tell the game the CD was ready.) And that was with a 32X CD drive. Today's drives are much faster.

Are there other games that are also having problems? Or just those two?

Pandora was working fine until I went to the police station. Now, no CDs work. Nothing will load. Other games wont run and music CDs won't play. I tried to access a pandora disk with windows explorer and got
"D:\ is not accessible.

The device is not ready."

This happened to me before. I had to replace the drive.

Well if the drive is acting like that with all CD's, that pretty much decides it. I hope your new drive lasts longer.