Beneath A Steel Sky CD32 WHDLoad loading times

[motorollin]

When I run the WHDLoad installed CD32 version of Beneath A Steel Sky, there is a short gap between each speech sample. The background music and animation stops while it is presumably loading the next sample.

Fortunately I have loads of Fast RAM, so I turned on preload and the problem went away (samples now play smoothly). However, this means the game takes about 5 minutes to loads. Any ideas what I can do?

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moto

[Angus]

I don't think there's much you can do. I was waiting ages for the game to load before I replaced my hard drive, but I think 5 mins is probably faster than it takes here.

What would be ideal IMHO is if there was a WHDLOad option that allowed accessing the CD, but I think WHDLoad precludes this possibility.

Its a drag because I've not been able to get the very effective CD32 emulation that came with IDEfix to work since I went down the Mediator route.

compromises, compromises....  

[motorollin]

Thanks Angus. I think I'll leave the preload option on as I would rather wait a few minutes and then play the game smoothly.

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moto

[MrZammler]

Well, for anything whdload needs to do outside the game (i.e. access the hard disk to load something), it needs to re-establish the os -> access the disk through the os -> close os and go back to the game. That's why you see the screen blanking etc.

[motorollin]

Ahhhh I see! That would explain why it doesn't happen on an actual CD32. Thanks for the explanation :-)

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moto

[TheGamingGenius]

Hi There

Old post i know, but

I had the exact same issue and although i didnt find out how to set preload, but I did manage to setup my chipset settings to eliminate the issue.

Basically set the Main Chip Mem to "2MB" and the the Z2 Fast to "256KB" and 32-bit Chip to "128MB"

Note: leave Slow and Z3 Fast set to "none"

This has completely resolved for me (although loading initially takes quite a while to load)