Adventures in debugging

[Originally written July 7 2020]

I decided I might as well complete the Creatures triad, so I downloaded a few quality of life improvement COBs and installed Creatures 2. I decided to make sure everything was installed properly before adding any of my downloads, though, so I booted the game up and… oh.

It’s worse than the screenshot makes it look; it’s laggy and the hand flickers like crazy. That’s alright, I’m quite literally a professional; a good portion of my job is debugging video games and cajoling them into working with hardware and software they were never designed to be compatible with. Let me just…

Err… It’s fine, I can fix it. Fiddle with a few settings here, administrative privileges there…

Good heavens! Okay, let’s try a different screen resolution – 640x480’s in the compatibility tab so that should be a good starting point. 

I can’t get a screenshot that properly conveyed what it looks like because my monitor is decidedly not 640x480 but the screenshots still save as such. But it seems to be an improvement. So maybe if I just continue down that path… Nope, no dice. Back to flickering. 

Alright, one more trick up my sleeve. I'll throw it on a Windows XP VM and see what happens.

… Let’s maybe come back to this some other time.