Posted on: December 6, 2014
Golffies
Games: Reviews: 5
a 1996 game fails to run on a 2004 PC
Screamer 2 is packaged on GoG with two display modes available : software drawn 3D and 3Dfx accelerated 3D. It is up to the user to launch the game choosing his preferred mode. Alas, none of them worked on my PC (Pentium 4 3.06 CPU + Nvidia GT430 GPU). In software mode, I never got rid of an annoying display shutter phenomenon ("tearing", likely a matter of screen redraw not being synchronized with VBL), whatever the parameter I chose to put in DosBox config files. On top of that, steering of the car with the gamepad suffered by such a lag that it made the game unplayable. I invested time trying to tune the gamepad settings by trial and error and failed to obtain a good result. In case it could help some other users, I put the link here : http://www.gog.com/forum/screamer_series/how_to_play_with_joystick In 3Dfx mode, both display and sound are choppy, which makes the game even less attractive. On top of that, for whatever reason, two third of the gamepad buttons stop to work, nothing being changed in the settings of the game. I failed to diagnose what might cause that, hence to solve it. GoG's support refunded me for my purchase, and explained that my PC might be too slow for 3Dfx emulation. It may very well be the point. However my PC makes running Grid - Race driver just fine, a 2008 game. It then put a question mark on the ability for such old games as Screamer 2 to run smoothly on recent versions of Windows due to the (too high ?) burden put on the hardware by Dosbox and 3D wrappers.
Is this helpful to you?
