Classic Environment lag and color depth

[Jcdeveed]

I use the Classic Environment on my PowerBook5,4, with OS 10.4.11, to play games for OS 9.

I recently discovered, with 3D Ultra Pinball 3, that the game's performance increases greatly (from very laggy to buttery smooth) if I click "No" when prompted with: "3D Ultra Pinball was designed to run in 256 color mode. [..] Would you like to switch to 256 color mode?"

I am wondering if similar performance improvements might be gained with other games, like Ferazel's Wand and Escape Velocity, which run very poorly, if they could be prevented somehow from switching the color depth to 256 colors.

Is there a way to "lock" the color depth in 10.4.11? Or to prevent applications from automatically changing it upon launch?

 

[Project Alice]

I use the Classic Environment on my PowerBook5,4, with OS 10.4.11, to play games for OS 9.

I recently discovered, with 3D Ultra Pinball 3, that the game's performance increases greatly (from very laggy to buttery smooth) if I click "No" when prompted with: "3D Ultra Pinball was designed to run in 256 color mode. [..] Would you like to switch to 256 color mode?"

I am wondering if similar performance improvements might be gained with other games, like Ferazel's Wand and Escape Velocity, which run very poorly, if they could be prevented somehow from switching the color depth to 256 colors.

Is there a way to "lock" the color depth in 10.4.11? Or to prevent applications from automatically changing it upon launch?

This sounds like another case of Classic isn't working the way I want it to. Do you have anything that can boot into OS 9? These games are not going to run at peak performance in classic. Maybe with 10.2.8 but certainly not in Tiger or Panther.

 

[Jcdeveed]

This sounds like another case of Classic isn't working the way I want it to. Do you have anything that can boot into OS 9? These games are not going to run at peak performance in classic. Maybe with 10.2.8 but certainly not in Tiger or Panther.

Yeah, can boot to OS 9 with my eMac, so I'm covered. Still... wish there was a solution.

Why would 10.2.8 help?

 

[Project Alice]

Yeah, can boot to OS 9 with my eMac, so I'm covered. Still... wish there was a solution.

Why would 10.2.8 help?

Classic was better in 10.2.8 and lower. It performed closer to booting into 9. If you're using a 15" 1.33Ghz or 1.5Ghz (PowerBook5,4) 10.2.8 won't work on those anyways.
I'm in a similar boat. I was trying to play Deus Ex on my 1.5Ghz PowerBook with Tiger but some of the controls didn't work and it was slow. I wanted to play it on my G5 but I couldn't get 10.2.8 to work on it; I ended up just booting into OS 9 on a 1Ghz TiBook.
As rarely as I use OS 9, I always keep a good Mac around that will natively boot into it because there are these old titles that were never updated, and classic isn't perfect.