User Guide

If you are using a card that is not listed as an option in the
setup program, it probably emulates something else. It is
usually a good idea to use the oldest version of whatever
card your system is emulating (ie. choose SoundBlaster over
SoundBlaster pro), as the older cards are usually better
documented so that emulation of those works better.
6. WHY IS MY CD-ROM GAME RUNNING SO
SLOWLY?
CD-ROM drives are much slower than hard drives. When
running a program from a CD-ROM, if you don’t run a
disk caching utility, the program will probably run slowly. A
disk cache program sits between the physical disk drive and
the program, reserving an area of memory that stores the
information most recently read from, or sometimes written
to, the drive. This speeds the system by keeping data, that a
program might need to look at more than once, in memory
instead of on the disk; for a computer, looking at memory is
much faster than looking at the disk.
The problem with this for protected mode programs is that
disk cache programs take up much needed RAM. Unless
you have 8 or more megabytes of system RAM, you will
probably run into memory problems when running a
protected mode program with a disk cache.
Some CD drives come packaged with caching software, but
the most common such utility is MS-DOS Smartdrive
(C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE), which also caches other
disk drives. All versions of Smartdrive that come with
or after MS-DOS version 6.2 (file date 9/30/93) can
cache CD-ROM disks.
MSCDEX (C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE) is a program
that comes with DOS and is packaged with some
CD-interface or drive hardware. Along with a
properly loaded CD-ROM device driver, it lets
DOS see the CD as a disk drive; without
GAME MANUAL
93