Playing on a laptop

[Lambert Simnel]

Anyone had much success playing this game on a laptop ?

On the IBM T40 I use, although most of the functionality is there, the game won't let me switch the numeric keypad functionality on or off. This means I can only do the dancing by clicking on the 1-9 checkerboard at the bottom right, and that's simply not as fast as using a numeric keypad. Similarly for swordfencing and naval battles. The end result is that while I can still manage naval battles fine, both sword play and general sailing are trickier than they should be, and dancing becomes a complete waste of time.

Any success stories out there on this ?

 

[rupertlittlebea]

You could always try an outboard keypad.

 

[Lambert Simnel]

You could always try an outboard keypad.

True, but I'm a bit reluctant to buy such a thing when I don't need it otherwise. I had hoped that someone might point to an ini file with an entry "Screw_Laptop_Numeric_Keypad=Yes" which I could then guess at a more appropriate setting for.

 

[Wolfwood]

You can use the laptop numpad if you hold down the Fn key at all times. That's the way I play the game on my laptop...

We can only hope that "the patch" will fix the numpad.ini so that it can actually be tweaked to respond to other keys in all situations... At present, only some of the changes work...

 

[Lambert Simnel]

I'll give the Fn key a try. Unfortunately, the game plays abysmally slowly on my laptop when running off batteries - I've tried playing with the power schemes, but I suspect that it's just trying to do too much (and with too frequent access to the CD) for my machine. As part of the idea of buying the game was something to do while commuting, this is another problem.

FWIW, I'm on an IBM T40 with a 1500 MHz chip & 512Mb of RAM. Any thoughts / comments ?

 

[Wolfwood]

FWIW, I'm on an IBM T40 with a 1500 MHz chip & 512Mb of RAM. Any thoughts / comments ?

I take it that it is the Centrino Mobile chip and not the normal Pentium4? That should make it fast enough for the game (since the mobile chip of 1.5 GHz is more or less comparable to a 2.3-2.4 GHz normal chip), so I guess your problem is either your graphics card/driver or, as you said, the fact that you are trying to play the game on battery power.

How much graphics memory do you have?

My machine is a 1.6 GHz Acer TravelMate 803LCi with ATI Radeon 9000 with 64MB virtual RAM and the game runs acceptably well on with all the video settings at their highest (when I'm at my desk with power hooked).

For mobile use, I'd recommend taking away the shadows and lowering the world detail etc. and try how that works.

 

[Lambert Simnel]

Thanks for the suggestions, Wolfwood - just haven't had a chance to try it out yet.