Civ 2 is too slow on a modern PC. What's up?

[PlutonianEmpire]

Ok, I'm trying to play a game of old fashioned Civ 2 Test of Time. Here's the problem.

Even with "fast units move" turned on, the movement of all my units is excruciatingly slow, even for an old game on a fast-ish computer. Using a different computer while Win 7 computer is in for repairs for an unrelated issue, the computer I'm using now is my Windows 8.1 HP. It is 64 bit, 4 gigs of RAM.

Looking at task manager, Desktop Window Manager is consuming way more resources than Civ2.exe.

My processor is 1.3 gigahertz, but considering my units used to move much faster on this computer than they do now, I don't know what's up. How do I fix this issue?

 

[Tahuti]

Windows 8.1 is to blame here.

Problem is, recent Windows have a relatively lacklustre support of 2D graphics and classic 1990s games that rely on DirectDraw including Civ2 suffer because of it. I have had similar issues when running Hearts of Iron 2.

The solution would be to install an older Windows (I think 7 still has native support for DirectDraw), or alternatively install Linux, and then install Wine using a compatibility layer of an older Windows. I have no idea how much the latter solution would work, but I guess it's a possible try.

 

[Erodin]

When in game, make zoom in, zoom out (upper left arrows and the main map), and then, CivII is quicker, don't ask me why it works !

 

[Maniacal]

On Windows 7 I had to install and run it on an XP Virtual Machine. Wasn't worth the time and effort to start that up all the time

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

On Windows 7 I had to install and run it on an XP Virtual Machine. Wasn't worth the time and effort to start that up all the time

Which version were you trying to play? I can play Test of Time fine and dandy on my Windows 7 machine, although I haven't tried MGE.

 

[NotEven]

What worked for me:

Have the Test of Time shortcut on the Desktop.

Start Windows.

As soon as the Desktop is displayed, double-click the shortcut to start the game.

Test of Time will run at proper speed (about 3 times out of 4 tries) (good (game) start). I can tell that it is a good start when the game-start movies don't display (black screen), but the music does play, and can't be interrupted. When the (unseen) movie ends, the mouse-clickable stuff appears.

With a good start, the taskbar does not flicker, and the Desktop Window Manager does not consume 25--50% CPU.

With a bad start, achieved by waiting for Windows to complete starting, the game-start movie displays and can be skipped by mouse-click, the game is very slow, the taskbar flickers, civ2.exe and Desktop Window Manager consume about 50% CPU all the time...

I don't know why this works.

System: desktop tower hp Win10x64 Home RS4 1803 en-US AAOEM, 4GB RAM, Intel Pentium J3710 @ 1.60GHz.