Tomb Raider Sound and Speed Problems

[Locutus]

Okay so there are two types of people that you will see register at a forum like this, the ones who knows all, and the ones who knows nothing. I am one of the latter. I need a couple of questions answered. First of all, I am trying to get only one game to play for me, Tomb Raider... that's Tomb Raider 1. I wish I still had the others. The thing is, I was cleaning out my junk getting ready to go off to the school dorms and ran upon this old PSX game. Now I had just recently gotten back into gaming when emulation of Nintendo products caught my attention. So I thought, what the heck, let's see if I can play this. Well, I was ready to pull out my old PXS console, but a few fully loaded boxes were umm... gently placed on top of it long after the PSX phase of my life ended like forever ago... needless to say the thing was crushed. So I went for the next best thing (other than spending much needed money) that mooching the freeware PSX emulator. I tested many emulators and quickly realized the usefulness of ePSXe. I got everything correctly installed and everything on two different computers. The graphics are great far surpassing any of my expectations on both machines, but the sound... now that leaves something to be desired. Plus there is a speed issue on my laptop, my primary machine. As I said, the college life is for me… there isn’t enough room in the dorm for a desktop and any other *strictly legal* devices I wish to put in there. So I promised my old desktop to my little brother, who, no doubt, will use it for nothing but surfing for porn… oh well. To tell the truth, I have beaten this game more than once so if I can’t get it going it is fine, but the fact that I can’t is really ticking me off. So now to the issues I’m having. On my laptop, the sound seems to be slow and really choppy and the speed issue makes the graphics skip just a bit every frame or so… just enough to be annoying. If the speed of the graphics was speed up it would look fine and if the sound wasn’t choppy and speed up just a bit, then it would be flawless. Here are the specs of my laptop [a bit crappy I know, but it was cheap]:

OS: Windows XP Home Edition, SP2 CPU: mobile AMD Athlon XP 2800+ ~2.1GHz VIDEO: RADEON IGP 320M AUDIO: Conexant AMC AUDIO MEMORY: 192mb

Maybe I need to get rid of some things running in the back round, I dunno. The desktop will run it almost perfect except the graphics appear to be just a bit too fast and the sound sounds like chipmunks. Here is its specs:

OS: Windows XP Home Edition, SP2 CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(TM) CPU 1200MHz VIDEO: Intel(R) 82810E Graphics Controller (Microsoft Corporation) AUDIO: Intel(r) Integrated Audio MEMORY: 256

[My laptop is usually the better machine for doing stuff on... I wonder why that crappy desktop is running it better?]

I would really like to get the game working flawlessly on my laptop, but I have no reservations about taking the desktop with me.

Both machines have the same sound and graphics plug-ins installed they are:

Graphics:
gpuPeteDX6D3D.dll
gpuPeteD3D.dll

Sound:
spuAndy.dll
spuEternal.dll
spuEternalL.dll
spuPeopsDSound.dll
spuPeteDSound.dll

I would appreciate any help you could give to me about this. Oh and BTW: before I posted this I ran a search for this problem and found out that I needed to click enable XA which is why it is a good as it is on the desktop, as it was crappy and non-existent.

Again, thanks in advance for the help.

-LOC-

 

[Chocho]

Play with the PC version!

 

[hagbard]

Make an ISO from your CD with ISOproducer, or commercial tools like CDRwin or CloneCD. It would make it work much faster, then load it directly or mount it with Daemon Tools to play. It might help to get a good CDr plugin, like Peops or Sapu. Also try lower resolution and color depth, and take a look at the ePSXe help file:

Too slow

If ePSXe is running to slow for you, there're several things to check. First off, is your system applying to the system requirements at all ? You can check this in the Introduction part of this documentation. Then, some people seem to forget that activating all these funny switches and increasing all the options to max. *may* slow down their PC. Check your graphic plugin and set your resolution, color depth etc. to a lower value. Some plugins come with pre-defined configs, it may also be a good idea to try out these. Trying another plugin is also a possibility, check out the Getting started section for more details about these.



If this didn't help, remember that ePSXe is very ressource intensive. Closing down all programs running in the background / systray, can therefor give you a nice speed increase.

 

[Locutus]

ChoCho I don't have that option as I only have the PlayStation version.

hagbard, how can I stop stuff from runnin in the backround? How do I know what I need and what is useless? I tried to make an ISO because I know it'll run faster (and because my bro wants the actual PS disk), but the ISO I make will only load to the main menu and wont go in-game.

I haven't tried ISOproducer but I have tried Alcohol 130%, CloneCD, ISOblaster and a few others including Nero 4 and Roxio 6.

-LOC-

 

[Chocho]

ChoCho I don't have that option as I only have the PlayStation version.

hagbard, how can I stop stuff from runnin in the backround? How do I know what I need and what is useless? I tried to make an ISO because I know it'll run faster (and because my bro wants the actual PS disk), but the ISO I make will only load to the main menu and wont go in-game.

I haven't tried ISOproducer but I have tried Alcohol 130%, CloneCD, ISOblaster and a few others including Nero 4 and Roxio 6.

-LOC-

OK, It was only a (bad) joke, I understod.

 

[montpics]

I haven't tried ISOproducer but I have tried Alcohol 130%, CloneCD, ISOblaster and a few others including Nero 4 and Roxio 6.

-LOC-

That should be fine as Alcohol 120% can mount the CD and you can set the CD plugin to that particular drive. (Remember to create 1 virtual drive on Alcohol120% settings)

Then about the slow thing. I don't know much experience on laptop since I don't have one for my own. So, try to use P.E.Op.S GPU plugin and set it to 'nice' function. (Remember try to make it as Window mode as I heard some people had some problems on certain emulators showing in full screen which would let the graphic looks slower and choppy.)

That's probably the least thing I could do for the time being.