Games pause on my G5 iMac when sound is played

[Deslock]

My 3-year-old son plays "Finding Nemo: Nemo's Underwater World of Fun" & "Dragon Tales: Learn and Fly With Dragons" on our new G5 iMac (20").

Everytime a sound is played (other than background music), the game pauses for a second. I've seen this before with PC games accessing the hdd (usually due to a DMA conflict or soundcard driver problem), but with everything being integrated on the iMac, I wasn't expecting issues like this.

I just noticed it a week ago... I could swear it didn't have this problem when we first installed the games last month, but maybe I'm remembering wrong.

Any ideas?

[yamabushi]

Does the software require the CD to be in to play? If so, then the audio files may not be stored on the hard drive - just the CD-ROM. If this is the case then there may be a slight delay since CD access times are far slower than HD access times. If this is the source of your problem then a solution might be to make an image of the CD-ROM on your hard drive and then mount the image whenever playing the game instead of using the the CD.

This type of solution also sometimes works on PCs but usually requires some additional software. If the game has certain kinds of copy protection this method will not work on one or both platforms.

By the way - these glitches are usually the fault of the game developer, not the hardware of the end user.

[dotnina]

How much memory do you have? Do you keep lots of programs open at once?

I'm no technical expert, but I've noticed pauses in certain applications if I'm running a bunch of different programs. As you might know, OS X is memory-hungry, and insufficient memory can cause slowdown or little pauses like what you've described.

[Deslock]

I have 1 GB RAM. I usually close other apps and logout other users before running one of these games. They require the CD to play, though I don't think they access the CD everytime a sound plays. However, I'll try creating a CD image and mounting it from the hdd.