Why do DOS programs “stutter” in a DOS session?
DOOM will freeze on occasion, precisely four times, then continue on normally. John Goulden enlightened me on this behaviour. I used to think it had something to do with the VGA BIOS emulation or such stuff, but when I saw games like System Shock still animating some parts while freezing during game play, I thought it had to be something else. John says: This will also happen if network drivers are loaded but no network is connected. If the ‘stutter’ occurs four times in rapid succession, at intervals of precisely ten minutes, it is very likely Windows 95 polling for the nonexistent network. Remove the unneeded drivers and the problem goes away. I wondered why this didn’t happen on a non-networked machine. Specifically, it seems to happen on systems that run Client for NetWare. The pausing might come from the client trying to reconnect to disconnected servers, or otherwise polling for a nonexistent network or server. Likewise, this pausing won’t happen if you only have the Dial-up Adap
