Gaming@NINA

I am experiencing a rather strange lack of performance when playing this game:
after 3-5 minutes the performance decreases to 40-50%, thus making it nearly unplayable. I tried all the performance speed up tips you can find (FAQs etc.), they only do minimal "damage" to this enemy. Does anyone have a clue?

for specs:
Windows XP (SP2), 2.4 GHz P4 in notebook, 512 MB RAM, external USB sound device
graphics controller onboard (no real graphics board or memory)
VBA 1.8.0.603

I had a similar experience with FF 4 Advance when playing the final boss (regular game, not Lunar Ruins): after a while the performance decreased drastically for unknown reason!

From what I know the graphics were rather hard on the GBA in the first place, and there was similar slowdown in the airship and battle parts. I'm using VBA 1.6a because ever since 1.7 came out, games slowed dramatically. Try using older versions as they seem to play FFV fine. Also, i'm on a laptop with 1.2GHZ PIII 512MB RAM and Radeon 16MB. From what it seems, you should have the advantage, but integrated video could always be the problem. Emulator wise, make sure you have performance eaters such as vsync and graphics filters turned off. And try the different graphics modes (GDI, DirectDraw, Direct3D, and OpenGL) to see which one is fastest for you. I also get these performance drops when the fan turns on. VBA is very power hungry and will heat up your system fast. As always, close any unneeded tasks in the background and make sure your are virus and spyware free!

yeah, 1.8.0.603 is considerably slower for some reason, try downloading 1.8.0.599, which I find much better. I uploaded it for you here: http://www.angelfire.com/magic2/jsemmens0/VisualBoyAdvance-1.8.0-beta2.zip

Also, you might want to check the throttle on your emulator.