Smithjam on 15/2/2002 at 03:47
I have an 800 mhz P3, and UW runs horribly on it. It's almost impossible to walk backwards, swim, or sidestep in certain directions. Moslo or any of those things don't work... My pentium 100 is dead now so I can't run it on that, and my 386 is too slow and doesn't have a CD drive (my UW floppies are corrupted). Would a pentium 200 still be too fast?
twisty on 15/2/2002 at 08:46
Have you tried playing it in pure DOS? I played through both games on a PIII 733 recently without any of those problems. Apart from side stepping which never seemed that great anyway.
DCLXVI on 15/2/2002 at 11:42
It works fine on my 1GHz Athlon, although the sound is incompatible with my Audigy.
DrCrypt on 15/2/2002 at 14:01
I've had these problems as well on my 1.4Ghz system in WinME. There's been some debate on the boards as to whether or not this is an Athlon specific processor problem, but I don't think anyone knows for sure.
All I can say is that although the problems are annoying, I've found strafing not particularly useful in Underworld - this isn't Doom. On the other hand, in those cases where I did need to strafe/swim/move backwards quickly, I found the best way to do it was to press shift while doing so.
Underworld treats this as a form of motion (I think it is meant for minimum spec computers to move quickly in choppy areas) so what happens is that Underworld seems to stop drawing something like 3 out of 4 frames of animation, but keeps you moving that entire time. This makes swimming, strafing and backing-up take place at normal "speed" though.
I'm not explaining this well, but try it, you'll see what I mean.
Al_B on 15/2/2002 at 14:22
I've found it VERY useful when walking on ice in Andunos.
Alistair
Smithjam on 15/2/2002 at 16:06
It does the same in both dos and win98. I've also tried holding down shift and it makes no difference. It is a pretty serious problem because it is almost impossible to swim while facing east, or back up in an easterly direction, or strafe to the east. very odd. Moving west, there are no problems. System shock and other games work fine, i can't understand why UW has such problems.
Shadowcat on 16/2/2002 at 00:51
It's certainly a curious one. The SHIFT thing works for walking backwards for me (800MHz Athlon), but the game doesn't let me side-step at all when SHIFT is held down.
In point of fact (for me at least), it's not only side-stepping and moving backwards that's affected in those directions -- normal movement is slower as well; it's just not so noticeable, given that walking and running is so much faster oevrall than sideways and backwards movement.)
It's an annoyance, but you can generally work around the issue okay.
Smithjam on 16/2/2002 at 05:41
I found a program called "turbo" that actually works fairly well if i set it at about 70% normal speed. I'd recommend it to anyone that's having the same problems I am. Now I can play UW again :)
DrCrypt on 16/2/2002 at 14:45
Hook us up with the link, yo.
Smithjam on 16/2/2002 at 16:21
www.execpc.com/~jsmith0/turbo.zip
