[Battousai]

Is this "normal"? Whenever I play a game, the hard disk gets read (accessed) constantly thus slowing things down. Does the CD-Rom driver have anything to do with it? I've got a 44X cd drive...

Please forgive the ePSXe newbie

AMD Duron 800, 64MB RAM, TNT2 32MB AGP

 

[cluthu]

How does your computer react when running other power-hungry apps? Does it slow down signifigantly? The reason I ask is because of your 64MB of RAM. If there's too little memory for your applications it'll cause Windows to "swap" memory out to the hard drive, where it can be retrieved later. While this is good, since it allows your computer to run without gigs of RAM loaded, the downside is that when signifigant swapping occurs the system slows to a crawl.

Does anyone else here have experience in running ePSXe with that amount of RAM? Is it slow for you also?

You might want to try disabling any sort of startup items you might have, close any other applications you might have open in the background and check to see that "DMA" is set on the system properties of your CD-ROM drive.

 

[Betamax]

That would be my assumption too... especially if you are trying to run a memory hungry os like ME.

 

[Ryos]

I'd also guess your RAM is a bottleneck. ME requires by itself half of your available RAM, which in turn is requiring a lot of VRAM usage (causing in turn your constant access. Basically the same thing cluthu pointed out). Either buy more RAM (preferably 64 megs or more) or turn off any and all unessential background processes and the problem should be alleviated somewhat.

 

[Battousai]

My PC acts this way only when I run ePSXe. Interestingly enough, I discovered that the problem happens only when epsxe is playing background music (off the CD), like when I'm playing Tekken 3 or Tony Hawk 2. But if it's FF8, the problem goes away. Hmmm....

Thanks for the replies!

 

[Battousai]

BTW, I don't think it's the Swap File. The accessing is pretty much there all the time, non-stop, as if there is some large file being copied to and from the hard drive and the CD drive.

 

[cluthu]

>that the problem happens only when epsxe is playing background
>music

Have you tried disabling the playing of CD Audio in your Sound preferences and seeing if the problems remain? Secondly, have you tried creating an ISO and running it from your hard drive?

 

[Battousai]

Right after my last post, I've tried disabling CD audio. Actually, I've disabled all the sound, but the problem is still there...

 

[cluthu]

>, but the problem is still there.
Did you try checking your DMA settings? I'm unsure if this would make all that dramatic a difference, but I'm willing to bet if your CDRom drive is using PIO mode it's going to be putting quite a bit more load on your processor.

 

[KillerShots]

I doubt he CAN mess with DMA settings on his CD-ROM...I have a T-BIRD 900, which uses the same board as a DURON, and my particular board comes with a separate IDE BUS mastering driver...which automatically determines DMA settings and gives you no choices. I'm not sure if this is standard, but it doesn't call itself a Gigabyte driver, it calls itself an AMD driver.

 

[Battousai]

I was able to change my DMA settings, but it didn't fix the problem. But then I've tried changing to all the other plugins and none fixed it, except for the ePSXE core Aspi plugin. It works great now. I could've sworn ePSXe core didn't work before, too, so maybe enabling DMA did work after all. Thanks for the tips, guys!

Now, all I have to do is fix FFVIII's swirl problem...

MS-6330 VA (KT 133 chipset) motherboard

 

[cluthu]

>It works great now
Congratulations I'm glad you got it to work.

 

[Battousai]

Thanks!!!