Age of Empires II on iMac G3

Question

I have a Lime iMac G3 with a 333 MHZ, 64 MB RAM, 6 GB Hard Drive, only 4 GBs is left, and Mac OS 9.2.2.
I bought Age of Empires II for mac and the system requirements is 233 MHZ Processor, 2 MB VRAM graphics card, Mac OS 8.6 or higher, 32 MB RAM, 500 MBs of Hard Disk. So I thought buying this, I have double the RAM, almost double the required processor speed, and more than enough Hard Disk space. It runs, but I need to turn on virtual memory and RAM disk under the Memory options, and AOE II runs very slowly. Is there any way I can make it run faster without buying more RAM?

Answer 1

You could try setting up a custom configuration using Extensions Manager
where you'd be using the basic extensions and control panels for the system
and graphics support, but shut off all other parts unnecessary for your app
(the game) and the basic system.
This could be very tricky; and you'd need to start by duplicating the full
set (and then renaming the duplicate before changing it; so you could
revert to the original extensions/control panels for other use) and it can
be a real chore.
Short of really upgrading an older machine, or getting one with the extra
resources to run the system and at least one major application or game
besides, even with the basic RAM and small HDD your early iMac has,
it will be a struggle. OS8.6 requires less RAM to run, and the more work
a system is expected to do, even behind the scenes, the slower it runs.
OS 9.2.2 needs VM turned on to handle your game and the base system.
Ideally, on just the RAM side, you'd fix the issue by adding 128+MB in a
RAM chip. But the model iMac you have may be one of the harder ones
to upgrade. A few were hard and others just more difficult.
Another avenue of upgrade is in the hard disk drive; more free space and
a faster spin rate effect available virtual memory and the speed at which
the system can draw this VM from the space it uses on the HDD for VM.
Essentially, the read/write speed of the hard drive and the fullness of it,
and [a lack of] a significant data buffer in the drive, makes it slow or fast.
An upgrade of these older models would include larger HDD + RAM.