Hmm... I'm wondering if there is some compatibility issues with Arcanum and Windows XP (SP1). The last time I was playing Arcanum, I was running Windows 98 SE and I don't recall having issues such as the following. Basically, after playing for an hour or two when going into either inventory or bartering screen the mouse will get really sluggish. Occasionally, it will also occur in the options screen as well. Finally, when exiting out of Arcanum it will sit there for a long time while the harddrive chugs for a while. Eventually, it will exit back into windows. I have the following specs: AMD Athlon XP 2100+ 512MB Ram Nvidia Geforce 4 TI4600 M-Audio Revolution 7.1 I certainly have more than enough resourses to play Arcanum so why the slow downs?
Check what is running in the background. You can turn off everything except systray & explorer. You should have everything you need in system resources.
Arcanum has memory leak issues. Not much you can do to solve it, other than patching, praying or going back to 98 SE.
Playing Arcanum on XP made me restart my computer every 3 or so hours. Because the game got unbareably slow :thumbdown:
So far, I've been having to do a combination of either restarting Arcanum or XP. Usually the former is good enough. it's a little funny how some of the best games are much buggier than the average ones. *cough* Fallout *cough* :lol: Perhaps the developers spent more time on making a Great game rather than a bug free one. Well being that very good crpgs aren't a dime a dozen I'll live with a bug or two.
Arcanum runs like a dream on my custom-built XP machine, even with the allegedly crappy Trident video card. :razz:
I have troubles playing it with ME. It works fine, but the video screws up. Usually, it's just leaky. Sometimes, though, I have to reboot, and it fixes.
Arcanum and Fallout 1 and 2 work really well for me. I usually use Arcanum as a coaster for drinks, since it has that graphic on the front that's really cool to look at, plus it adds sort of a no-slide surface. The Fallout cd's are working great too, see, I'm training my dog to catch a frisbee in the air, but he's just a young pup, so I needed something smaller than a frisbee. Plus, the shiny, reflective surface allows him to track it easier.
I've been running Arcanum on an XP machine that is either less or equal to what you have and it runs fine, even when I don't restart for several days on end. Even unpatched I never remembered a big slowdown. Maybe you just have a really big party or you're trying to run too many spells while running through a heavy graphics area?
That's not the scenario that took place with Arcanum. Games are rushed these days by greedy publishers are are anxious to earn cash. Because of Sierra's genious, the game was not only rushed, but it was warezed to hell before it hit the shelves and made much more less money. Because of this, I find a sequel unlikey since Sierra owns the license.
I have nearly an identical PC (running WinXP), and have similiar problems, I found that Arcanum has a horrendous memory leak problem. I dont know if its just gradual or when I save games, but when the games slows down or basically locks up I see in the Task manager that it is using around 500MB of memory. Even though I have 1GB of RAM, thats still way more than it should be using.... I save the games and exit then reload the game about every 3-4 hours. No reboot necessary,
