CFS1 Loads Very Slow

[fafnir757]

I'd love to fly this sim, but it takes forever to load and the app also tends to crash.

It takes 2-3 minutes to load a mission - is that normal?

I have no 3rd party add ons.

Are there any patches?

I've got a celeron 600
Windows ME
512 megs RAM
GeForce2 64 MB video (Asus 7700) AGP
Sidewinder Pro USB joystick

I'm running DX 9 and I'v got good video drivers.
I've got a 7200 rpm hard drive & done a full install of the game so that it doesn't have to go to the cd-rom.

I'd think that my system is well above the minimum required - it should be pretty awesome for this game, no?

I've tried the AGP fix in the Config file, and that helped.... a little.

I'm going to try setting the refresh to 60Hz to see if that helps.

Any advice appreciated.

[ozzy72]

Okay sounds like system lag.
First check your machine for ads or spyware using Spybot and Ad-Aware (you can download them both at downloads.com).
Next defrag your hard drive.
This should probably speed things up.
Also how much spare HD space do you have?

Ozzy

[Dan]

Yeah you've got a kick @$$ setup for CFS1. I have a PIII 500Mhz and I get around 30-40FPS maxed out. And a good load time.
dan

[fafnir757]

I've got Spybot S&D and all is well there.

I've got 1 gig of HD space (less than 50% full) and defragged.

Framerates are fine when the sim is actually loaded & running.

It takes 3-5 minutes to get from clicking the icon to the main menu, skipping the intro movie.

Takes 3-5 minutes to load the mission.

After mission takes 3-5 minutes to get back to the main menu.

Takes 5 minutes to exit the game to the desktop.

So 20 minutes of thumb twiddling and if I crash on takeoff in a collision it really kinda sucks!

It seems that changing video modes to & from 3D is killing my system.

[Dan]

1st off, when you are at your Desktop hit Ctrl-Aly-Del and see if there are many entries. In Win98 End Task all but Explorer and Systray. Then start CFS.

Failing that may I suggest posting this in the Harware forum?
Dan

[fafnir757]

Yep - Shut down everything but systray & Explorer.

I even ran msconfig & disabled all the background processes - even Norton Anti-Virus for a while.

I wonder if it's that CFS1 want to use DirectX 6 and I'm using Directx 9 instead & it's not so hot emulating down to 6.

I'll post this prob next in the hardware section.

Thanks y'all.

[fafnir757]

Well, noone in hardware seems to care.

What kind of load times are *normal*?

What do you all have for hardware & what kind of times to load?

[Hagar]

Well, noone in hardware seems to care.

It might not be that they don't care but don't know the answer. CFS1 is getting on now & most people are running CFS3 or FS9 on powerful machines & WinXP. Not much point in commenting if you can't help. You seem to know what you're talking about & probably know more about this sort of thing than me. I've had CFS1 since it was first released & it always ran fine on the lowest-end systems. I seem to remember some people with a Celeron CPU having problems. You have plenty of RAM & it sounds to me more like a conflict of some sort.

Here's a few tips from my failing memory. First, I don't think DX9 is the problem. I installed the latest DX9.0b recently & CFS1 runs fine. Check your Windows desktop display settings. CFS1 never liked running above High Color (16 bit).
Install the No-CD patch or tweak Combatfs.exe as shown in the Help section here. This removes the CD & CD-ROM drive from the equation completely.
If you're not running CFS1 in Full Screen mode, hit Alt + Enter.
If you know how, set up a proper Windows Swap file. Windows does not manage virtual memory efficiently. Then defrag your system. This & more tips here. http://www.burzurq.com/forum/trevtweak.html

Please tell me if any of this helps.

[Dan]

I will try to fix / re-install my CSF1 and tell you how fast it loads. Try a 1GB swap, thats what I use.
Dan

[Hagar]

Here's another tip. CFS1 will load much faster without the opening video. Open Combatfs.cfg in Notepad & change the ShowLogo= value to 0.

[MAIN]
ShowLogo=0
NoWarnNot256=1
Location=188,102,836,628
Maximized=0
HideMenuNormal=0
HideMenuFullscreen=1

I just checked mine & the menu screen appears in less than 10 seconds. This is on a PIII 800, 512 Mb RAM & WinMe.

PS. The first default mission loads in almost exactly 15 seconds.

[fafnir757]

I figured most people have moved on to CFS3 etc, but I have CFS1 & would like to work my way trhough all of them - I guess I'm an anachronist....

Thanks for the burqz website - that's a great write-up.

I've tried most of those settings except the 1gig swap file - I tried a 370meg swap file but it made no diff.

I'll try 1gig next and see what happens.

I do run it in full screen mode, I've edited the exe so I don't need the cd, and I've turned off the movie.

What's funny to me is that I tried this on a 166 MHz machine with win 98 & 128 megs of RAM and the load times were awesome - the frame rates were terrible but it loaded just fine!

So what's the diff between win 98 & WinME that would cause this?

I don't think it's a video issue - I've even turned off hardware acceleration & this made it even worse!  

These 2 things kinda points to the swap file I think.

To be honest, getting this to run is maybe more of a goal for me than actually playing the game itself!  I just gotta know what's going on in there....

[Hagar]

CFS1 is still a great combat sim. I upgraded from Win98 to WinMe when it was first released. I never had a problem with it running any of my M$ sims. I suspect you have some kind of hardware conflict, either with the CPU or video card.

[DrRedskwirrell]

I know this is an old thread but just for the heckuv it....

I used to have a load of different squad aircraft on top of the cd aircraft. The actual games took forever to start because they have to load all this stuff for your selection and some of the files can be much larger than the original cd files due to artwork etc.
I found the solution was to have a separate aircraft folder. I used the stock cd aircraft as defaults and then cut and pasted the additional aircraft I needed for a particular mission before loading CFS.
Soon as I did this my loading time came down.

I don't actually have the additional's anymore as I have a new system now and the rest of my squad no longer fly the game.  :'(

The only add-on I have now is the RAF662 gunsites... oh.... tell a lie... I have the Ark as well  ;D

[Dan]

Hey I forgot to post this link to my loading times:

http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb/ ... 1095964070

Have a look.
Dan

[DrRedskwirrell]

Mine loads in 7 seconds (random mission loaded and launched in 10). I get over 100 frps constant on max settings