Gaming FF4 Speed Problem

[edgeblade69]

Anyone have any information/advice on fixing the persistent/constant lag problem of FF4? It lags on the computer I'm on now (a cheap 2-year old laptop) and on my desktop which is 3-4 times as fast at least.

I've tried VBA, NO$, Boycott, no luck with any of them. No$ crashes, VBA runs at MAX 150% or so, same with Boycott. That is with speed up toggled, 9x frame skip, 1000% throttle, etc. Same general thing with Boycott.

Is there a patch to speed it up or software toggles I could use or anything? It drops down to 30-40% at some points and does it quite frequently which quite frankly makes it unplayable.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[FAST6191]

When it comes to frameskip less is better and high numbers like that will result in fairly jerky gameplay.
The game is not coded/ported that well so some lag is due to the games coding too.

Oh and drop the screen size, do not use any filters and use directdraw (as opposed to something else) and fiddle with the settings of that.
You tried various emulators you said but if using VBA I would suggest using a 1.7 line (I still use a version of VBALink based on 1.7.2) rather than the 1.8 betas.

One final thing clean your laptop of dust: mine is only marginally newer and was running slow at various points due to the fact it was clogged with dust and overheating.

 

[nl255]

FF4 has quite a bit of lag (mostly in airships and battles) even with an original cart on a real GBA (M3 with soft reset is about the same) so don't expect it to work well on an emulator.

 

[Thorisoka]

I heard that some laggy bugs have been fixed on the european GBA version, but the lag on airships remains.
Plus, IIRC, the game already lagged when emulating the SNES version, and given the GBA version weren't optimized...