Tweak3D.net - Midtown Madness

Updated: September 19, 1999
Written by: Dan "Tweak Monkey" Kennedy

Even More Visual Tweaks

Far clip distance: This slider will allow you to choose how far the objects away are rendered. For more realistic play, set this option farther away (+), and for a higher frame rate, set this option lower (-). I personally like to see as far as I can, so I set this option all the way up. This results in a lower frame rate.

Lighting quality: As you probably guessed, this is the overall quality of the lighting effects, including headlights, sunsets, and light reflections. This will not effect performance as much as clip distance, so set this to where you're comfortable. I recommend pumping up the lighting quality. On some video cards this effect may not be as noticeable as on others.

Speed loading: You probably think an option called "speed loading" would actually make the game load faster, right? Well, it does for some people, but doesn't for others. I tried loading Midtown Madness without Speed Loading enabled three times. The times it took to load were: 21 seconds, 17 seconds, and 17 seconds (in order). With Speed loading enabled, it took 10 seconds, 4 seconds, and 4 seconds. So for me, Speed Loading was much better. However, I have received a number of e-mails saying that Speed Loading drastically increased the loading times and/or caused terrible performance hits. Perhaps it has to do with system ram or virtual memory size. I have 128 MB SDRAM. Try both settings: enabled and disabled. You should know right away which works better for your system.

Before deciding that all of these settings are what you want, test the game several times.

Sound Tweaks

There are only a few options to tweak the sound in Midtown Madness. To access the sound menu, start Midtown Madness. Click the Options button. Click Audio Options.

Device: If your sound card supports DirectSound, try enabling this. You will know by clicking the selection box. If you see "DirectSound..." try it out. The game should sound the same, but will actually be using less CPU power to work.

Stereo FX: If your system desperately needs performance, set the sound system to Mono instead of Stereo. This will help mostly on low end systems with older sound cards.

Sound Quality: As with the Stereo FX option, only lower this if you desperately need performance.

Play Music: If you uncheck this box, the CD audio music will not be played. Disabling CD audio will help performance for most machines.

Next Page