Enhancing the Performance of CartReady ^TM

There are some simple settings in CartReady ^TM that will greatly enhance the speed at which it plays carts, including carts that are played back-to-back. It involves lowering the audio card buffer size in CartReady ^TM.

What is the Audio Card Buffer

When you press F3 to play audio we take this audio and store it into a buffer. A buffer is like a temporary storage area. When we play the cart we read the information from this buffer. Now why lower the size? The bigger the buffer, the more audio to read, therefore the longer it takes to read. By lowering this buffer we have less information to read, therefore the less time it will take to read this information before you hear audio playing. Reducing the buffer can reduce the delay to a fraction of a second.

How to Lower the Buffer Size

Lowering the buffer size is easy.

1) From the CartReady ^TM Production Screen press F10.

2) Highlight Configuration Changes and press .

3) From the next menu highlight Audio Board Configuration and press . a warning will appear. Just press any key to get by the warning. The following screen will appear.

4) Highlight the audio board you wish to change and press . You may have only board listed (if you only have one audio card in your computer.

5) Highlight Buffer Size and press .

6) The default value is 32. To determine which value to use:

Audio Cards

* SB16/LAN = SoundBlaster/LAN SB16/SA = Soundblaster Stand-Alone

Once you have changed the settings press F4 TWICE to save the change. Then exit the program and restart the program.

Changes to your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS

There are two other changes that can be made to your computers settings. These settings involve the FILES= line in you config.sys and adding a program called SMARTDRV to your autoexec.bat.

Editing your CONFIG.SYS

1) Exit out of the program and out to a DOS prompt.

2) From the C:\> prompt type EDIT CONFIG.SYS and press .

3) Look for the line that says FILES=xxx. Change the line so that it says FILES=50. If it is already 50 (or more) then no change is necessary.

4) Press ALT-F. From the menu highlight EXIT and press .

5) If you made a change it will ask you to save the file. Just press . (If you didn't make a change it will not ask you this.)

6) If you made a change to you FILES= line in step 3 then you must reset your computer. If you did NOT make any change then you do NOT need to restart your computer.

Editing your AUTOEXEC.BAT

In order for you to use SMARTDRV you must have a minimum of 8MB of memory. If you do not have 8MB of memory then you CANNOT use SMARTDRV.

1) Exit out of the program and out to a DOS prompt.

2) From the C:\> prompt type EDIT AUTOEXEC.BAT and press .

3) Add the following line: (if it is already present then no change is necessary)

C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE /X

4) Press ALT-F and then from the menu highlight EXIT and press .

5) If you added the line it will ask you to save the file. Just press . (If you did NOT have to add the line i.e. the line was already present it will not ask you to save it).

We are using the default settings fro SMARTDRV. Changing these settings (such as cache size) will not have any effect.

What Do These Settings do for Me?

Fiddling with these settings can have an enormous impact on play response and back to back playing with version 6.

What does the Future Hold?

Currently we are working on version 7. Version 7 puts the cart index into memory, and not only make seamless playing finally possible, but on fast 486 and Pentiums overlapping will be possible too. Version7 will also make the above adjustments unnecessary for most users. Version 7 is available to people with valid support plans who request it.