Trouble with Games by Black Isle

[Rectifier]

Planescape: Torment
Baldur's Gate Series
Icewind Dale Series

All amazing games in their own right, however, after wishing for some nostalgia playing these games on my laptop, I'm finding that there are crippling lag issues with my laptop.

Basic comp stats:

Core 2 Duo @ 2.2 ghz
2gb ram @ 789 mhz
Nvidia Quadro Nvs 140M @ 512 mb
Windows XP Service Pack 3

Yet during certain animations the games have extremely low framerates, and compatibility mode to Windows 98/Me does not seem to work, any suggestions?

[Assassin]

... Uh, graphical issues? Probably the games aren't ungraphically-hungry as how you might think them to be o3o

[Dan]

Perhaps disable one of the CPUs while playing? I know dual core have some issues with older games.

[Rectifier]

@Assassin: I know they aren't graphically intensive, but regardless it lags during certain spells and there are graphical hiccups. The hiccups I can work with, the spells that bring frames down to 5< is kind of unplayable at the moment.

@Dan Hmmm, that might work, is there a way to do that with a shortcut command, or do I have to use the Task Manager after launching?

*edit* Nevermind, I found a program called Winlauncher XP that can launch programs to processor affinities without using the task manager, I'll have to test this later to see if it helps, a short 10 minute run on bg2 seems to indicate that it works better. Perhaps I can combine this with compatibility mode....

In the meantime, any help is appreciated!

[Dan]

Sounds like you found an interesting program. I had to make a processor.bat file to manage things for me.

[Rectifier]

I found it here, it can do more than just create launch affinities, worth checking out.

[Darklor]

And does it work? Are those games now playable for you?

[Rectifier]

Baldur's Gate 2 works almost flawlessly (slight graphical things, but thats to be expected), I found out that if certain paths are incorrect in baldur.ini, it wigs out.

For example, if you have a CD stored on a hard drive instead of a disc drive, you have to spell out which directory it belongs to or the game doesn't launch and can give you 2 or 3 different errors, or it lags your computer so bad you have to restart.

The original game also seems to have been solved by this.

So for whatever reason, it *wasn't* my dual core that made it lag like crazy on those two games, but I still need to re-test Torment's spells, because the paths weren't a problem for that game, so it might very well be the dual core issue for that game.