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Fujitsu 186
Posts: 11
| Hello all! I have an issue that I'll like to ask other people about.
It might be related to software, so if some admin or mod want to move this post to the other thread, it's ok!
My boss was going to throw away a Toshiba notebook, so I took it home. That one has a Celeron 650MHz (Coppermine) with 128kb of L2 cache (at the same FSB of the cpu, which is 100MHz), and 16kb of L1 (I+D).
For now, I installed Win ME (since I had some troubles with the USB in windows 98). Everything works normally, kinda slow, but whatever. I enabled the DMA in the hard drive and the cdrom. Bios enables by default the enhanced mode of IDE. Still, the HDD seems to be slow. I tried the AIDA's disk benchmark and I got around 10MB/s in all tests.
If I play an mp3 with Winamp (5.35), or some other player, the CPU goes to 96%. It doesn't matter if the MP3 is 44kHz, 48k, 22k sample rate.
This notebook has a Yamaha DS-XG YMF724 (VEN_1073&DEV_0012) and I don't know if thats the issue. Driver version seems to be 5.12.01.228.
When I was younger, I had a Pentium II running at 300MHz and playing THE EXACT (yes, the exact!) same files didn't cause that much of a trouble (that PC had an ISA sound card, which I think it was a sound blaster clone, a really crappy one).
I know thats not a fair comparision since I don't have the exact details of the PC (ie the chipset), but whatever.
This might be a normal behavior, and I'm just a noob in this subject (which is true!).
I would appreciate any kind of comments, and I will try whatever thing to make this thing work better.
Thanks!
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
 
Location: Hull, UK | Perhaps try an older Winamp version? I remember someone once demonstrating how beyond a certain point, Winamp on Win9X / P6-era gear actually ran worse, likely due to code optimization for later machines.
If you want to try different YMF724 drivers I can drag out the ones I use, but I don't know if they'll work with your onboard version, nor if they would improve things. Good sound chip though.
Old laptop drives can be slow sometimes, my Compaq 2100US was from a couple of years later and rarely exceeded that speed on a good day.
If the CPU usage is up in other players I can't really be sure why that would happen aside from, on a total wild guess, perhaps something to do with video drivers? I'm not sure, but if they're not installed correctly or if the "Acceleration" slider isn't cranked up in the display properties, the continual updates to the screen by the media player could be slowing things down. Of course, I could just take the shortcut and say "Windows ME" because strange things can happen under that operating system. |
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Fujitsu 186
Posts: 11
| DXZeff - 2017-07-02 11:31 PM
Perhaps try an older Winamp version? I remember someone once demonstrating how beyond a certain point, Winamp on Win9X / P6-era gear actually ran worse, likely due to code optimization for later machines.
If you want to try different YMF724 drivers I can drag out the ones I use, but I don't know if they'll work with your onboard version, nor if they would improve things. Good sound chip though.
Old laptop drives can be slow sometimes, my Compaq 2100US was from a couple of years later and rarely exceeded that speed on a good day.
If the CPU usage is up in other players I can't really be sure why that would happen aside from, on a total wild guess, perhaps something to do with video drivers? I'm not sure, but if they're not installed correctly or if the "Acceleration" slider isn't cranked up in the display properties, the continual updates to the screen by the media player could be slowing things down. Of course, I could just take the shortcut and say "Windows ME" because strange things can happen under that operating system.
I'll give a shot to an older Winamp version, however, the fact that other players (except WMP, since it doesn't start at all, yelling me that "There was an internal problem" do the same thing points towards a hardware/driver issue (it's my wild guess).
About the hard drive: Yes, I think its pretty crap, but thats how it was back in its day.
Another thing that I should mention, this machine has an S3 Savage/IX with 8 megs of VRAM. The Hardware acceleration slider is cranked all the way up. The version of the graphics driver is 4.12.01.7109-7.15.30 from 28/11/2001. The system BIOS is the last one, v2.0.
When I try to play the good ol' Abe's Exoddus or Abe's Oddysee (a favorite of mine), it works SOOOO SLOW. Not kidding, but in the same Pentium II of my childhood (which had a crappy trident vga card) it ran marvelous. It's like this notebook is cursed, or Windows ME its crap (as you mentioned, and I'm leaning toward this more and more).
This notebook came originally with Windows ME, so I thought it shouldn't behave this bad. When I tried Win98, I couldn't use the MSD USB drivers, since my language is spanish and those drivers only work with english versions of windows. Even if I continued with the installation (and the shell changed the language to english!), it didn't recognized the MSD at all. It was marked as an unknown device.
I did gave WinXP a shot before, but I forgot to try play some MP3 or some games. I should re install it if Win ME results a true no-go. |
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | I can't remember for sure now, I know I mentioned it in a video at some point but I think it was Winamp 2.95 that I found to have the least cpu usage on older hardware, like my P60 I think it was....
CPU usage should not be anywhere near that high on a Celeron of that clock speed for MP3 playback, mobile or desktop, unless, speedstep is disabled in the bios in which case that cpu runs at the slowest possible speed at all times on laptops. |
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Fujitsu 186
Posts: 11
| waybacktech - 2017-07-03 2:09 AM
I can't remember for sure now, I know I mentioned it in a video at some point but I think it was Winamp 2.95 that I found to have the least cpu usage on older hardware, like my P60 I think it was....
CPU usage should not be anywhere near that high on a Celeron of that clock speed for MP3 playback, mobile or desktop, unless, speedstep is disabled in the bios in which case that cpu runs at the slowest possible speed at all times on laptops.
I checked about speedstep, but its nowhere to be found in the bios. However, there is a "CPU power" setting, which is set to Maximum performance.
Winamp 2.95 seems to go about 33% of CPU playing the mp3 files, even displaying the spectrum analyzer!
Using DirectWave instead of waveOUT, it uses about 36% of CPU.
Neat!
However, I can't get better performance of the game I told in the previous post: Abe's exoddus or odyssee. Have you ever used one of those S3 Savage/IX cards? If thats the case, which version of driver have you used? That might be causing some performance degradation in the game. Or maybe its the hard drive (since im plyaying the game from the hard drive instead of the CD). However, I think the HDD (even being crap) should perform better than that 4X CD.
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Fujitsu 186
Posts: 10
| That could be so many things.... Different versions of DirectX or even different releases of the game that may have had something done to make it more sane on newer hardware. If you're sure its the same release of the game you could try another version of DirectX or the game could be taxing in another way that is more prevalent on the laptop than it would be on a PC like you mentioned storage. Without some troubleshooting on your end it might be hard to guess. The fact that youre saying its both games seems to be pointing to something on the system...
Its good you got the MP3 situation sorted out since MP3s should work smoothly even on an ancient machine. With a sufficiently good player though it may studder under much load you can get MP3s playing on pretty ancient stuff. Way back when I remember .MOD music being the big thing and then MP3s showed up and made everything else seem like shit. |
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Fujitsu 186
Posts: 11
| Loktai - 2017-07-03 9:40 PM
That could be so many things.... Different versions of DirectX or even different releases of the game that may have had something done to make it more sane on newer hardware. If you're sure its the same release of the game you could try another version of DirectX or the game could be taxing in another way that is more prevalent on the laptop than it would be on a PC like you mentioned storage. Without some troubleshooting on your end it might be hard to guess. The fact that youre saying its both games seems to be pointing to something on the system...
Its good you got the MP3 situation sorted out since MP3s should work smoothly even on an ancient machine. With a sufficiently good player though it may studder under much load you can get MP3s playing on pretty ancient stuff. Way back when I remember .MOD music being the big thing and then MP3s showed up and made everything else seem like shit.
The only thing that I CAN'T guarantee is the DirectX version used in my childhood PC. In this notebook I've installed DX9c (from the full package). The game version is the same, since it's the same CD from way back 2000.
The thing plays awesome under Windows 10 x64 (yes, the exact same version).
Nonetheless I'll try to run some benchmkars, namely 3DMark 2001 and 99, just to check if the performance is in the same ballpark as similar notebooks/PCs. Any suggestions about the bench suites? I saw the names of other benchmark tools in dxzeff's and waybacktech's youtube videos, but I don't know if they will give me useful information in this case.
Thanks!
Edited by cocus 2017-07-04 1:26 AM
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | Savage/IX is not really that capable of a gpu, even by 1999 standards. Something low cost/low power specifically designed for notebooks. Drivers could be part of an issue, Savage was plagued with driver issues in general, though I don't think you would get a whole lot more. Some of the performance issues also probably come down to the chipset on the motherboard as well. |
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Fujitsu 186
Posts: 11
| Well, if thats the case, I should stop bothering with this notebook and maybe switch to my Dell Latitude C610, which *should* be two stories better.
So sad! I had some hopes for this notebook  Anyway, thanks for your replies! (I won't throw the thing away just now, i'll play a little bit prior to that) |
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Chips 386
Posts: 34
| I heared that DX9 had many compatibility issues with windows 9x. I prefer myself to use DX7/DX8 on my win9x machines as there are only a few games that will use DX9 and that they will run munch better on a Windows XP machine rather than on a win 9x machine. Especially when the machine is really too slow to play those games. Stick with DX7 or DX8 and you'll have less compatibility issues. Maybe your problem will be fixed |
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Fujitsu 186
Posts: 11
| Deksor - 2017-07-04 9:00 AM
I heared that DX9 had many compatibility issues with windows 9x. I prefer myself to use DX7/DX8 on my win9x machines as there are only a few games that will use DX9 and that they will run munch better on a Windows XP machine rather than on a win 9x machine. Especially when the machine is really too slow to play those games. Stick with DX7 or DX8 and you'll have less compatibility issues. Maybe your problem will be fixed
Hi Deksor, I've tried that with DX8 (since DX7 doesn't work with ME). Same story, the thing is slow as hell.
I also tried different color bit depths, without any difference. The game fixes the screen size to 640x480, so resolution is out of the equation. |
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | I like the latitude and inspiron laptops of that era. c610 would be a good choice, provided you upgrade the video card from the ati mobility to a geforce 2go or geforce4go. |
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Toshiba Satellite 2800 (Celeron 650MHz) MP3 playback issues?
