beyond atlantis 3

I have win 98 se
My graphic card: nvidia ge force 4 MX 420
I can install and play the game BUT It's so slow
I have to wait near 45 sec. between each scene
My DX is O,K,
<img border="0" alt="" title="" src="graemlins/cry.gif" />

Other than in the game, does your computer run slow? If so, you may want to delete non-essential programs from the start menu.

Are your audio and video drivers up to date?

I assume you mean Beyond Atlantis 2.

BA2 was slow for me too until I used a CD drive emulation program to copy the CD's to the hard drive.

On a PIII 750 with Geforce II TI 64 MB video card -

Before copying to the hard drive - response lagged between 6 and 17 seconds after a click, depending on the part of the game I was in

After copying to the hard drive - response lagged only a second or two

I don't think the game was made very well.

where do you find that cd drive emulation program?

The one I used was Daemon-Tools from www.daemon-tools.com/

It isn't as user-friendly as some of the others, like Virtual CD, but it's free.

Thank you so much...it works just perfectly
So I can finish the game with great pleasure
after copying the game response lagged instantly

Great. I hope you enjoy your game and have no further problems.

Having same problem, only worse. Continual blue screen messages saying 'cannot read data on CD' or something like that. I feel I must save the game at each successful move ahead in the game since I went from CD2 back to CD1 [in Siberia]. The Egypt CD2 was slow and had crashes now and then, but this on CD1 is unbearable. I'm interested in the CD emulator mentioned, but the link does not get me there. Farstone Technology sells one for $20 US for games only, but too many unanswered questions. For those of you who have used the Daemon Tools program--when you uninstall a game, do the assigned drive partions default back to Drive C, or do you end up with a lot of superfluous drive partions to deal with?

The Daemon-Tools site is down at the moment. I wonder if it's on the same server as adventuregamers and mixnmojo. I've been unable to get into it for the last few days. You can still get it by following links from here . But that seems to be a Taiwan site rather than the usual site.

Daemon-Tools is a little difficult to figure out at first and there may be other CD emulation programs that would be easier for you.

Daemon-Tools lets you set the number of virtual drives you want. Reboot after setting the number, and they will appear between your hard drive letter(s) and your CD drive letter(s). For example if you have a hard drive with 2 partitions and set Daemon-Tools to have one virtual drive, your hard drive letters will stay the same (C: and D: ) and your virtual drive will be drive E:. It will appear in Device Manager as a generic "stealth" drive of some sort. Your CD drive will be F: (or F: and G: if you have two CD drives. If you set Daemon-Tools to have no virtual drives and reboot, your hard drive and CD drive letters will be the same as before you installed Daemon-Tools.

Now if you have one of those computers that puts it's CD drives on M: or N:, I don't know for sure where the virtual drive would show up, but I assume it would be the drive letter just after your hard drive letter(s) and your CD drive letters wouldn't change.

To use Daemon-Tools, you need a program that will make a drive image from the CD. I use a DOS-based program called Front-End which used to be downloadable from the Daemon-Tools page, but you can also use Nero or Clone CD or some other program. You can't use Adaptec/Roxio because it doesn't make the usual type of drive image.

To play a game using Daemon-Tools, you first make a drive image of the game CD. If the game has more than one CD, you have to make 3 separate drive images. Then you mount the first game CD. At that point you may get autoplay if you haven't disabled autoplay for the Stealth drive in Device Manager. Since games usually only play from the drive they were installed from, you will probably have to "swap CD's" by alt-tabbing out of the game at CD changing time, unmounting the CD1 drive image, and mounting the CD2 drive image. Then you go back into the game and click OK to continue the game.

If a multi-CD game checks all CD drives for the correct game CD (like Morpheus and the 3-CD version of Rhem do) you can create as many different virtual drives as there are game CD's, reboot to have them take effect, and then mount a different game CD image in each one. Then there's no swapping.

The version of Daemon-Tools that I've been using is version 3.20. They are up to version 3.33 now. I don't know if there are any significant changes.

There's a help page here that might be clearer than my description.

Jenny, thank you for all the infomation. As is turns out, my CD-ROM drive has been slowly giving up the ghost and it showed up only on these games but not on other applications until now. I'm looking into getting a CD-RW to replace it. Your reply directs me to get one with software compatible with the emulator, i.e., steer clear of Roxio. The 'How-To' use the emulator seems complicated both by your description and the link you provided, but I'm pretty sure once I get into it will be much clearer to me. It still isn't clear from your post or the Daemon Tool link what happens to the created virtual drives once the game is uninstalled. When I get this all in place I'll refer back to your reply to help it all make sense. Again, thank you for all the help Jenny. Merle.

The created virtual drives stay there until you unmount the CD image and choose "none" for the number of virtual drives. You'll understand better when you see it in action. After you're done with the game, you'll probably want to delete the CD images because they take up a lot of space.

Ah, thank you for answering that question. Got the CD-RW installed last evening. Had issues with setting the jumpers. The zip drive is on the same cable. But, finally got to try Riddle of the Sphinx--works beyond expectations. Beyond Atlantis II works without a crash or even lengthy load times [1 to 3 seconds], but the panning is noticeably jerky, almost dizzying if I go too fast. So happy to have my games back! Thanks again, Jenny. Merle.