My specs (a little old but better than the minimum system requirements)
Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz
512MB RAM
Geforce 6800 AGP with 128MB VRAM

Neo-Geo and arcade games are choppy and nearly unplayable if I try to play them in the Deluxe player. It doesn't matter if I'm playing an old game like Space Invaders at 800x600, or a newer game like Metal Slug at 1600x1200, quadruple the resolution. The performance is equally choppy in both situations.

If I play these games in the Lite player, performance is perfect.

Tomb Raider: Legend has adequate performance. If my system can play Tomb Raider: Legend well but it can't play the Deluxe Player and Space Invaders well at the same time, something's wrong. What's wrong?

im assuming your running at most xp right? so what else is running?

hmm... could be internet connection related, WIFI doesn't get along well, any P2P network like limewite running could cause it.

how many running processes do you have?

Yeah I have the same issue but I think mine is because I don't have enough ram right now.

I am using wireless and WinXP. I have this problem even when the only open application is the Deluxe Player. I have 33 processes running at the moment (I'll probably have less once I close all of the applications currently open), and the only running program on the taskbar is AVG.

I'll see what happens if I close it and try running the Deluxe player.

Ok, I killed as many processes as I could. With nothing but these 15 processes...

csrss.exe
gametap.exe
lsass.exe
services.exe
smss.exe
spoolsv.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
System
System Idle Process
taskmgr.exe
winlogon.exe

...performance is just as bad as before.

try it without the wireless, just a hard line connection to your modem if possible. see if there's an improvement.

just want to see, also, what is the date on your video drivers

I don't have a wired NIC.

Drivers are from nvidia.com, Forceware 93.71, date 10/22/2006, WHQL certified.

blue__balls, I'd like you to run some diagnostics and submit logs so that maybe we can focus in on what the problem is.

Start the Deluxe Player and play something where you get the bad performance. Close the Player. Then, run GameTap Utilities (it's in the same program folder as GameTap). Select the Advanced Tab. Run the two scans and submit your logs. Please make sure you reference this conversation and give a brief description of the problems you experience. Submit your logs. When the logs are submitted, you'll get a handle for the logs. Please post the handle here.

I can't guarantee we'll find a solution (I suspect it's too little RAM), but at least this provides a good starting point. Thanks.

Your issue handle is: Kilo-817

wierd, my setup is almost identacle to what you listed, except I have more ram, it ran fine before I added the ram, which is really wierd, are you installing on multiple drives?

Similar setup here too, and no problems. I do have 1 GB of RAM, but it seems like that shouldn't matter too much with every other process shut down. While playing Metal Slug, GameTap's working set was about 150 MB, and I'd bet much of that was the pre-game video which would be quickly paged out. In any case, GameTap should be using about 100 MB during gameplay.

You don't have anything downloading in the background by any chance, do you?

->are you installing on multiple drives?
I have two hard drives, but everything gaming related is on my secondary hard drive. So is my swap file. Windows is on the primary hard drive.

->You don't have anything downloading in the background by any chance, do you?
Nope.

Message was edited by: blue__balls

I find that gameplay stutters a lot if Gametap is downloading games in the background, so I just finish off my downloads and everything is fine. Kinda lame for some of the bigger games though...(I'm looking at you, Tomb Raider: Legend and FarCry).

Out of curiosity, what is your resolution set to inside and outside of gametap?

have you tried defraging your drives (i ask b/c GT will frag up a drive really bad) at one point i had a 92%file fragmentation and they was all GT folders might want to try that

> {quote:title=crackeyes wrote:}{quote}
> have you tried defraging your drives (i ask b/c GT will frag up a drive really bad) at one point i had a 92%file fragmentation and they was all GT folders might want to try that

That doesn't seem like it would work though, if the Lite player works great and the Deluxe doesn't.

I've noticed in your prev posts alot of talk of multiple drives. Do you have more than one physical disk or do you have multiple partitions on one disk? Also if you have your windows swap file on the same physical disk but on a different partition you're not really doing anything to improve performance as far as swap and disk access are concerned. One other thing I've noticed is that you seem to be running the default Micro$oft drivers for your SB Live! sound card. If memory serves these drivers were not of the utmost quality and stability. Again this could be a long shot but you may want to dig through the creative archives and find an updated driver from the SB/creative site. http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/ May also want to look into upgrading your video drivers to see if that helps..newest ver avail is 94.24 avail at http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_94.24.html

->what is your resolution set to inside and outside of gametap?
Gametap resolution: 800x600 (for troubleshooting purposes)
Desktop resolution: 1920x1200

->have you tried defraging your drives
I'll try it. Windows thinks that my games partition could use defragging.

->Do you have more than one physical disk or do you have multiple partitions on one disk?
I have two physical disks, and each one has multiple partitions.

->One other thing I've noticed is that you seem to be running the default Micro$oft drivers for your SB Live! sound card.
I'm pretty sure I'm using Creative's drivers. I did install the LiveDrive UniPack of Feb. 2003. If you need to do more than that in order to use Creative's drivers, I don't know what it is.

->May also want to look into upgrading your video drivers to see if that helps
I'll try that too, but not today. I can't really risk computer instability by making major changes like that until this weekend.

Ok, a big update. I have found a way to get acceptable speeds from games played through the Deluxe player. I have uninstalled Gametap and reinstalled it to my primary drive. After doing this, arcade games run much better. However, I'm not really satisfied with this as a solution, because my primary drive is the smaller of the two, and I never intended to keep games on it.

Is there any way to find out why the Deluxe player is slow on my secondary hard drive but fast on my primary, or anything I can do about it?

Primary hard drive info:
Western Digital WD800JB
78.2GB
7200RPM
Ultra ATA/100

Secondary hard drive info:
Unknown brand and model
134.2GB
SATA 150

I don't remember the brand or model of the secondary hard drive, but I remember that it's SATA 150, and is newer than the first one. The Device Manager is unable to give the drive a meaningful model name - it just calls it "ST316002 3AS SCSI Disk Device." My SATA controller is from Promise Technology, and I have the latest driver installed.

Problem over. I just reinstalled to my secondary drive, and now it's performing fine. It's still a mystery to me why it was lagging before, but it isn't now, and I'm satisfied with that. Thanks, to everyone who offered advice and help/

I'm willing to bet that there was an issue during the update. I have noticed that on my computer, if I update GameTap with a major update I will have to run the setup file again to get the performance I did before the update.