Unbearably slow on an older PowerMac

Howdy,

I run Pillars of Garendall on my PowerMac G4/466 with 640 megs of RAM under OS X (10.0.4). It's a fantastic game! The graphics are smooth, gameplay fluid. No complaints at all. Many of my colleagues, though, aren't fortunate enough to have a machine as powerful as mine. They running on imacs and older machines with G3 upgrades. So, I installed Pillars of Garendall on my office machine which is a PowerMac 7300 with a 300 mhz G3 upgrade, 128 megs of RAM and OS 9.1 to see how it would run.

As the subject of this post says, it was unbearably slow. I tried turning off the music and bumping up the RAM and that made it a touch better. Still, though, it was nearly unplayable. The system requirements of the Pillars of Garendall home page says a PowerMac and OS 9 or OS X. Yet, clearly you need a machine more capable than an older PowerMac. I doubt Pillars of Garendall would run even at an unbearable speed on any non-G3 PowerMac.

What are the minimum system requirements of Pillars of Garendall? Also, how can you boost the speed of the game on an older PowerMac such as the G3 upgraded 7300? I'd love to recommend Pillars of Garendall to my colleagues but at this point, I can't see how since it would run unbearably slow on their machines.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Robert

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Quit the Finder. That should help some.

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macmaxbh
"I don't need romance." Zak Kebron told her confidently. "I have goldfish."

I've got an old 7600 with a Sonnet G3/500MHz/250MHz/1Meg backside .. and i've got about 160Megs of RAM .. and .. in order
to make all operations/applications run faster i've done the following:

Turn Virtual Memory off
Drop your RAM cache in your Memory control panel to as low as it will go
I've made the minimum RAM partition 80Megs; preferred size 90Megs
Run no other apps or background tasks while running PoG
You might even consider making a special Extension set for PoG with a minimum of control panels and extensions

Oops .. forgot to mention <sorry> .. i also have a Voodoo 5 PCI video card .. but .. you shouldn't need a high-end card of that
caliber. However, some kind of video card would be better than standard motherboard/VRAM video support. Your VRAM
on that machine gets maxed out at 4Meg .. no offense .. but that's pretty wimpy video support by today's standards. Low-end
PCI video cards of the 8 or 16Meg variety are pretty readily available on eBay .. lots of reliable good/inexpensive deals out there.

You could go 1 step further than that and get an ultra 10krpm drive, but that's probably overkill.

You might try the setting/s adjustments 1st .. then see if you need to augment your hardware.

Hope this info helps!

Keep on Pillaring!

''o))

I have a 333 mhz imac with 64 megs of ram, and 600 allocated through virtual memory and it runs perfectly.

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Hi everyone,

Thank you for the prompt responses. It sounds like the system requirements for Pillars are definitely not just a PowerPC based Mac with OS 9 or OS X.

I tried all of the suggestions with that were possible with my stock hardware, i.e. allocating more RAM, running with extensions off, and killing the finder. Unfortunately, they made very little difference. My guess is that while the processing power of the G3 upgraded machine is capable, the rest of the stock hardware is just not enough.

This also leads me to believe that there is little chance that PoG will run at a bearable speed on stock PowerMacs older than an imac or the original PowerMac G3 (desktop or mini-tower).

I could easily replace the hard disk and get a new video card and upgrade the RAM again but that would practically turn the old 7300 into a brand new computer. It doesn't pay.

Oh well - I guess my colleagues will just have to stick with Cythera and EV Override.

Robert

P.S. Maybe the programmers should reconsider their minimum requirements. A PowerPC processor and OS 9 or X are just not enough.

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I'm running on a Powermac 9600 with a 233mhz non-G3 processor, 176MB of RAM, and
OS 8.6. I've allocated 120MB to POG, and with the exception of saving the game,
game play runs at a very playable speed.

So actually yes, POG can be played on a non-G3 machine withough playing with all
the configurations or settings. Mine is a happy camper.

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Shoot 'em with everything you've got. If anything still lives, shoot 'em again.

I have a 300 mhz g3 with 6 mb video card ram and 192 mb ram and it runs slow like a snail(almost). I have tried to kill the finder, turned off extension etc., but it still goes slow. Its a pity, becouse I think that PoG seems cool and Coldstone even cooler...

ZRob .. when you did the G3 card upgrade, did you remove the old L2 cache DIMM from its socket..? If the L2 cache DIMM is still installed on the motherboard along with the G3 PCI upgrade card, then all functions will be dog slow. You might want to double check and see .. just a thought.

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Macs r happy <> windowsnot

''o))

Hi again,

I definitely removed the L2 cache DIMM when I installed the processor upgrade. The frankenmac as I like to call the 7300 works perfectly. The problem with PoG is definitely not the machine. Oh well, I guess I'll recommend it only to people with a more capable system.

Rob

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