From: Date: Sun, 11 Aug 1996 17:23:53 -0400 Subject: Kennel Club, PUSHIT! Everything I know about speeding up AWFW 2.05 on AOL. 1) Select stickbox instead of artificial horizon. 2) Turn off every continous sound you can, especially wind, & maybe engine if you find you don't need it. Non-continous sounds will only slow you when on, flaps & gear sounds can be good reminders of where they are, & don't have much speed effect. 3) When you get to the AW screen with the 3 planes that say fly online multiplayer (after AW starts up, the 3rd screen), hit alt+tab, then close all open windows, and minimize AOL itself. 4) Go to AW setup, & detail level/custom, turn off everything you can live without (gotta have expoding enemas!), but mainly horizon shading & mountain shadows & plane shadows. 5) If its still too slow, & you in higher resolutions, select 800x600 or 640x480, till you get 15 fps (frames per second, use OD to tell you what yours is) in a furball (at detail level 4 or 5). You want more than 24 if you can get it outside of combat, on the idea that it may drop in combat & you won't have time to check), but anything over 15fps in combat is OK :/ 6) If you have DOS 6 or better (or various 3rd party programs for multiple bootups for DOS 5), you can make multiple config.sys & autoexec.bat startup configurations. You can have one for AW where you don't use any TSR that is'nt actually used for it. You can lose setver, for instance. Idea is to save CPU clock use. Also, load everything you are keeping high, you should be able to get 620k of lower DOS memory in DOS 6, 634 with QEMM, 624 for DOS 7 (comes with Windows 95), 627 for QEMM + DOS 7 (I am using both, but can't use some QEMM 7.04 features with W95). 7) If you have 8 megs, you will want little or no disk cache, or anything else that would eat up extended memory. 8) (From Maris) and you probably want a Windows 3.1 swap file at least as large as your memory, with 8 megs RAM, he was saying at least double your system RAM is good(note, different for W95, it has both permanent & temporary swap files, some can be permanent, some temporary). Note, this may slow down other things outside of AW if it is TOO large, as it takes longer to access. While your at it, with Windows 3.1, too many groups on your desktop slows down winows a lot, move as much as you can to as few groups as you can, and lose anything you don't need. And, Windows 95 is faster for AWFW, and more stable than W3.1 (but less stable than Warp or NT, but more generally compatable with hardware/old software than these). And, of course, both W3.1 & W95 want 16 megs of RAM, if they can get it (the speedup is especially pronounced in W95, disk access almost seems to stop from 8 to 16 megs). 9) BIOS- In your computers BIOS setup (get to it by hit at bootup), some people can find things that will speed up stuff. If your bus speed is faster than 33 MHz (as it is on some machines, 486DX/40 or 486DX/50 or 486DX2/120, not DX2/40 or 50, their bus speeds are 1/2 of CPU speed), you can select "transparent flow control", which will speed up your video some. 10) A 2 meg video card helps a lot, it should be VESA or PCI bus if possible (can get these used from computer swap bulleten boards). VESA 2.0 bios on the card, or UNIVBE51a may also help (or they may not). 11) Lose the windows (either brand) wallpaper, sounds (especially for W3.1, not sure if it effects W95), and screensaver, and as many startup progams as you can live without. 12) It is poissible to go to computer shows & get cheap "586/133" moherboards, not real pentiums, but a bit faster than a 486, and at $129 it's cheap. This, and computer bulleten boards with message forums for buy/sell/swap of computer stuff are good places for cheap partial upgrades that will get you up to minimal AWFW speed (15 fps in a furball at short range at 640x480). 13) If all that does'nt work, get out and push! o---)Baddog>--------- (With a slow computer, it can take all day just to takoff ;) ---)-Musketeers------