Slow On-screen Graphics

[Noel]

I have an IBM, Intel Pentium III 550mhz with 128meg of Ram, and 16 Meg on the video card. An IDE Sony CRX145EBK writer set as the master drive. It copies whole discs perfectly, makes compilation CDGs (up to 21 tracks on a disc) perfectly, and makes perfect CDGs from the KHP program. The only problem I have is the play feature - from hard drive, or disc the graphics on the computer screen scroll perfectly, but very slowly, and way behind the music. Since my video card has twice the required memory, It couldn't be that, or could it still be the video card? Is there a setting I can change?

[admin]

Noel, it could still be your video card. If the card is a VooDoo 3 card from 3D Effects, we have had problems reported in the past with this card.

To diagnose your problem, we need some info from your computer. Click the Windows Start button, then the Run command and type in dxdiag and press the Enter key. This will collect information about your computer installation. Click the "Save All Information" button at the bottom right. Save it into your "My Documents" folder with the title [your name] dxdiag.txt. Then, email this to support@mtu.com.

[Paul McNerney]

I'm having the same problem with home producer and mircrosudio. My video is lagging the audio in both home producer and microstudio. I'm using a Presario PII 350mh with 256meg ram and a diamond stealth III with 32meg on board memory. I've got the latest ASPI drivers from Adaptec and the latest direct x drivers. All other features in both programs work perfect including burning the disk. I ran the direct x diag program and it confirms the drivers and the 32 meg on board memory on the video card. Has anyone had this problem and come up with a solution yet?

Thanks

Paul McNerney
pmc181@aol.com

[Noel]

Thanks Paul, I'm not the only one then. I have checked with the vendor re trying another video card, and was informed, to my disgust, that I have a "domestic consumer" machine that was never intended to do the kind of things that I want to do with it. The video card is an integral part of the motherboard, and cannot be replaced with another, nor can it be disabled to allow a plug-in card to do it's job. I can see the good people at MTU nodding their collective heads about now and saying "We told you so, you should have bought a proven work-station from us!" to which my answer is, if I lived on your side of the world, I would probably have done so. Since I'm not, the only thing I can do is to hope they can come up with a solution. I might add that Video CD, and DVD run on this computer perfectly and cheap and simple Sega Saturn game players will play the discs I burn, and show the graphics. Could the problem really be a glitch in your codecs, MTU?

[admin]

Noel, our display code has some convolutions in it that might create video problems. However, given the few that are experiencing what you are (Paul found his problem was with his Compact computer and the video card he had), it is most likely your computer is the culprit. We will be totally rewriting the video code in an upcoming version upgrade. It will display the video full screen while playing, appearing just like a Karaoke Player machine and a monitor. When we rewrite it, your problem may go away.

Please run the dxdiag.exe program on your computer and email support@mtu.com the resulting file. The post at: http://mtu.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?threadid=14 gives details on what to do. The data this will give us on your computer may give us an absolute direction for you.

[Scoob7809]

I had the same problem. I changed my video settings (right click desktop, settings)from 24 bit to 16 bit, and that fixed the problem.

[Noel]

Thanks, Scoob7809. Your suggestion didn't work with my set-up, but it did encourage me to poke around a bit. I took this path to fix the problem: Start Menu, Settings, Control Panel, System, Performance, Advance Settings - Graphics, and then re-set the Hardware Accelleration. The system was set to FULL (Optimal) but there are three other settings - MOST (still no good) BASIC & NONE. The graphics scroll perfectly with the acceration set to either of the lower settings. The hassle with all this is that every time you change the settings, the computer has to be re-started. I now don't know if I should leave the settings at low accelleration permenantly, or return them to optimum and just reset when I need to play CDGs on the computer?

Any comments/suggestions MTU?

[admin]

We have a new Microstudio V2.1 version nearly ready to release. We have completely re-written every bit of the video processing code. We have even been able to play CDG songs that would not run with Microstudio on ANY computer or video card. We are playing these with 1MB video ram, direct-x v1.0 (i.e. the very first from Microsoft, now at v8.0), with hardware accelerator turned off, on a Pentium 166MHz CPU.

We were preparing our e-Commerce site to download the software to you easily. However, the contractors messed up big-time and we had to pull the e-Commerce site down yesterday. Now we are facing a major difficulty to get all our Microstudio clients the new code. It has a new Serial Number structure that will allow our site to auto-deliver the software on new sales. We are working on what to do.