f13.net forums - Half Speed: Sucks to be me/Gamedrive 8.0 is evil

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June 20, 2025, 10:52:25 AM

we're back, baby

I was playing around with the Gamedrive software and upgrading to Gamedrive 8.0 screwed up on me. Blue Screens of Death in Windows XP when it was trying to automatically install the new virtual CD-ROM drivers. I was able to snake my way out of there by disabling the virtual hardware before Windows XP detected it.

Unfortunately, I've found myself in the grips of a new problem: 3D Game performance has more than halved. Where FFXI Bench used to get a score of about 3700, I'm now pulling a score of 1500. Same seems to apply to all of my games.

While I was struggling to recover from my BSOD issues I had disabled shadowing. I've since reversed those changed and I've determined that my CMOS settings are optimal. I know it's not a CPU or memory speed issue because I can use apps that involve raw CPU speed/memory at the same speed as prior to this disaster.

It entirely seems to be focused on 3D performance. I've checked the clock settings on my ATI Radeon 9700 and they're the same I've recorded they should be.

Uninstalling Gamedrive does not remove their proprietary drivers. Removing them manually just causes Windows XP to reinstall them. Prior, I witnessed attempting to disable them simply causes a BSOD, but this no longer is the case. Unfortunately even setting these virtual drivers to "disabled", the half-speed performance degregation in 3D apps remains.

Overall the lesson here is don't use Gamedrive. Or if you do, upgrade to 8.0 at your own risk. Right now, inexplicably I was able to upgrade to 8.0 on a third attempt, but now I'm still hosed. Nearly 2 year old games like Jedi Academy are running sluggishly. New games like City of Heroes and Thief 3 are so sluggish as to be unenjoyable.

Since I've determined it's not a hardware issue, I'll probably have to reinstall Windows XP to remove these "virtual" drivers that Gamedrive has added. I can only hope that this software didn't write something to some flash memory somerwhere that's permenant.

Actually, I haven't entirely ruled out the possibility I have a CMOS reconfiguration around here somewhere. However, it may be a hidden setting, since everything visible in the CMOS looks good.

Jesus christ. Use the virtual cd-rom program built into Alcohol 120%.

Next.

Quote from: schild

Jesus christ. Use the virtual cd-rom program built into Alcohol 120%.

Next.

Or use Daemon Tools. It's free and I've never had a problem with it.

Daemon Tools does some crotchety shit in the background, but it's almost always completely benign. I had some problems with it on a past system, but since then - Alcohol 120% has been nothing but good to me.

Did AGP get disabled?

Regarding Alchohol 120%, looks like a nice piece of software but I never picked it up before. Doubt it could do a worse job than Gamedrive did to my system, and that it includes burning functions as well doubles the pleasure. Too late, unfortunately.

Quote

Did AGP get disabled?

Not in the CMOS or the display driver config, but come to think of it, I should probably give DXDiag a run... well according to DXDIag all three are enabled. (DirectDraw, Direct3D, AGP texture Acceleration)

The Test Direct3D button seems to run fine in Hardware DX 7,8 and 9 tests. However, it's still pretty slow, hmm.

Whatever the problem is, it appears to be entirely centered on the graphic operations. I've already reinstalled the graphic card drivers. My Via Chipset (blech) drivers are up to date. CMOS settings for my AGP port all look good, and Windows reports it's running at 4x AGP speed. Plus, I've already checked and determined the VPU is running at the proper speed. However, the FPS have taken a definate dive. It's really boggling.

I've not yet bothered to reinstall Windows XP because I'm not entirely convinced a software solution will fix the problem.

I wonder if this issue could also be tied to my downloading the latest Windowsupdate security patch, which happened at about the same time as this GameDrive 8.0 malfunction.

A thing to remember is that Alcohol 120% is a memory hog compared to Daemon Tools, I've been using both and hands down without much of a contest Daemon tools wins.

After tweaking the snot out of my bios, looks like I've gotten my speed back. It probably wasn't Gamedrive that caused it to go away so much as my bios disabling some hidden setting when I turned off the internal cache that did not get restored when it re-enabled it. Loading the Bios's "hi performance defaults" seems to have done the trick.

However, I'm not letting Gamedrive completely off the hook because if it wasn't causing BSOD when I tried to upgrade it to 8.0 this problem wouldn't be here in the first place.